Let's talk about social and digital ads. When we work with clients, we often suggest a digital ad strategy to go along with an organic social media plan.

For the sake of this post, let's think of social ads as:

Facebook and Instagram (Meta) TikTok, Snapchat, and yes, even Twitter. (Stop lol) Digital ads as: Google, Youtube, and other retargeting platforms like Adroll.

We'll talk more about social ads in a future post, but for now, let's focus on Google ads. You know, the first thing you see when you search for anything on Google.com.

Many of our clients are 5013c non profit organizations. We tell them to apply for the Google Ad Grant because most non profits are eligible.

The Google Ad Grant, gives nonprofits $10,000 a month to spend on ads in Google search. You read that right 10k per month.

We were able to get our client, Route 66 Marathon approved for the Google Ad Grant a few years ago. Here are a couple of examples of how their ads show up in search.

Here's the thing, to our knowledge, every non profit that applies for the Google Ad Grant gets it. There are things about the application that you need to know before you submit to make sure you don't get denied.

Here are a few steps you need before you get started

1. Create an account on Techsoup.org
2. Sign up for Google for Non Profits

We used a company called Non Profit Megaphone to make sure we had our ducks in a row.

Your website is another key in the process. You'll need to:

3. Make sure your website has text. (I know this sounds crazy, but some sites are image or embeds only)
4. Connect your website to Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager

We had the pleasure of having Nonprofit Megaphone submit a session for our SMTULSA Virtual Conference in 2020. If you want to learn more about the Google Ad Grant. Watch the video below.

Reach out to us if you'd like for us to help you through the process or reach out to Nonprofit Megaphone and get your Google ad Grant application.