A question I often get from nonprofits, what can you actually get from the Grant. And what ROI can I get from paying someone to manage it.
The honest answer for most - none, at least not straight away.
Because the Grant doesn’t bring you donors, it brings you strangers.
And strangers will not donate unless they are bought into your mission.
You might point to religious nonprofits, which often do well at turning search traffic into donations.
But those donors were bought into the mission long before the click. I wouldn’t compare a two thousand year campaign to yours.
So unless you’re capturing people actively searching to donate, that stranger from Google still has to:
- 01Connect with your cause
- 02Trust you’re the one to tackle it
- 03Believe their money will make an impact
- 04Decide on an amount
- 05Pull out their card
- 06Type in their details
- 07Donate
Ask yourself honestly, how equipped is your website to get a stranger to do all of that on their very first visit? Because if your ROI depends on them doing exactly that, you are setting the bar incredibly high.
So how do we turn Google Grant strangers into donors?
Well, to start with we stop them being strangers.
See once Google brings someone to your site, they mostly wash their hands of it.
Yes, Google can optimise your ads to bring in people more likely to trigger a conversion. And yes a donation can count as a conversion.
But that only works if you’re getting enough donations for the signal to hold in the first place.
So why not get Google to optimise for a conversion that leads to a donation?
A conversion that turns a stranger to a supporter.
Because a supporter is far easier to turn into a donor than a stranger. And the nonprofits best at bringing in retail donors all follow the exact same pattern.
I’ve now built those patterns into a repeatable system that plugs into almost any nonprofit’s Grant to turn strangers into donors.