In the first of several posts I’m going to suggest why your nonprofit organisation should apply for a Google Grant and how it can boost visits to your website. The example I’ll be using is the Greek Care website, a recently commissioned site for care providers looking after Greek elderly people in Australia.
What is a Google Grant?
It’s free advertising, only available to nonprofit organisations, that shows your ads to people when they perform relevant searches using Google.
You get a Google AdWords account and the ability to create simple or complex ad campaigns. Create an ad (it can be text, an image or even video), decide which page on your website it should link to, then choose the keywords that you want to trigger your ad. Here’s a tutorial.
Boosting a new website’s visits
Before and immediately after the launch of Greek Care, press releases were sent to various online magazines and print publications relevant to aged care. This resulted in a sudden surge of visits but a week later the stats had completely dropped off.
At that time nobody could find the website by using search engines. Websites don’t immediately appear in search results - it can take several weeks - but we sped up the process by creating an XML sitemap and uploading it via Google’s Webmaster Tools.
Unfortunately, even after the site’s pages were listed in Google’s results, our stats told us that visitor numbers were still low. This was a good time to start an online advertising campaign so I applied to Google Grants.
Applying for Google Grants
The application form is simple enough provided you’re well organised. Different countries have different forms (e.g. US, UK and Australia and others) asking different questions. You’ll need to show proof of charitable status, provide contact details, and be able to explain how you think Google Grants will benefit your organisation.
It took only a few weeks to get a response saying that we’d been accepted. We were lucky, other organisations have waited up to six months for a reply.
In their confirmation email Google requested that we set up a normal AdWords account (except that there’s no need to enter credit card details) and let them know our username and a few other details. Within another two weeks we were able to login to AdWords and set up our first online ad campaign.
In Part II : How Baptcare, an Australian nonprofit, benefited from a Google Grant
