Many nonprofits enjoy a year-end donation surge.
And so, they focus their digital marketing programs on November and December.
But here’s a secret: If you want to raise donations at the end of the year, you need to lay the groundwork now and sustain it through the spring and beyond.
Here are my recommendations on how to do this with PPC advertising.
Keep budgets consistent
With an emphasis on year-end giving, many nonprofits will pause all advertising until November. Not a good long-term strategy.
As with all Google advertising, consistency is key, even for nonprofits.
This is what we work with our non-profit clients to achieve. One client, for example, offered us an agile budget: while our advertising was performing positively, the sky was the limit.
This worked very well in 2020-2021 when COVID-19 and other factors helped drive interest and conversions for our nonprofit’s worthy cause.
But when interest and conversions slowed in 2023, our performance-based agile ad budget would have dropped to a level where the impact of our advertising would have been negligible.
Instead, we talked to the client and they agreed on a base monthly budget of $3,000 that we could focus on fundraising campaigns and build engagement and awareness.
This approach really paid off. As you can see from the chart below, we’ve kept our investment in Google Ads consistent throughout the year and continued to see a positive return each month. In some months we broke even and in others we came out ahead.
By the time we hit November and December, the revenue numbers were poised to rise.
I strongly suspect that we ended the year much better than we would have if this client had not continued to invest in their advertising throughout the year.
Learn more: How to use Google Ads to get more donations for your nonprofit
Follow up of the competition
If you need more motivation to stick to a basic monthly advertising budget throughout the year, track your competitors.
By using different tools, you can see if competing nonprofits are pausing or withdrawing their campaigns outside of big giving months, which can open the door for you to get your message across.
Don’t obsess over competitors
While you want to watch your nonprofit competitors, you shouldn’t obsess over what they’re doing. (This also applies to for-profit advertisers).
Years ago, a competitor of one of our non-profit clients secured a high-profile celebrity spokesperson. The celebrity’s family had been personally affected by the cause and was actively promoting the other non-profit organization.
Raising awareness for important causes is a good thing for everyone, but at the same time, my non-profit client also has a big role to play in supporting this cause. And I was worried that we couldn’t “compete” with the celebrity spokesperson and get our message across.
But guess what? We did, and we still do.
Unfortunately, in this case, the competing nonprofit did not fully utilize the celebrity spokesperson in its website and marketing. This left us with a window of opportunity to communicate the important work our client was doing in this space and send more donations our way.
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Take advantage of high (and low) value video assets
We are fortunate that the non-profit client mentioned above has some great production value video assets that we can use in their advertising.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t get away with using less flashy assets. We’ve seen that even lower production value assets (especially video) can perform very well.
So if you have a solid video testimonial that didn’t cost millions to produce, don’t bother. Use it!
Focus on getting in front of the right people with a message that resonates with them. If your asset is a little rough around the edges, it might not matter.
We can also dispel the perception that video campaigns are expensive. It’s not always like that. It depends on different factors, and you can usually make adjustments to stay within your budget.
We’ve created video campaigns for clients with monthly campaign budgets as low as $500 per month and these video ads still make an impact in terms of impressions and views.
When video campaigns are carefully targeted, it’s surprising how many people watch a one- or two-minute video ad to the end and click through to the landing page.
Get out of your comfort zone
I have talked about the need to maintain a constant base budget throughout the year.
But that doesn’t mean that budget shouldn’t be stretched a lot during the giving season.
That includes December, of course. But it should also include parts of November and January.
Here are some of the guidelines we use to think about holiday events in the US:
Mid-November through Thanksgiving weekend and Giving Tuesday: Increase ad campaign budgets by 2X to 3X.
december: Increase ad campaign budgets by 4-5x.
January: Keep budgets high for at least the first week when many people are still in the spirit of giving.
In short, don’t be afraid to increase your budget more than you have in the past and stick to it for a longer period.
Everything is a test and nothing is absolute
If you really want to lay a solid foundation for December, you need to create and stick to a testing and learning plan that you apply throughout the year.
It’s the best way to monitor your nonprofit, your industry, and Google itself.
By testing continuously, you’ll go into the giving season with a good idea of which campaigns you should be leaning toward and where to put your budget.
This is a much better approach than holding everything off until November and hoping that what worked last year will work again this year.
Dig deeper: A/B testing mistakes PPC marketers make and how to fix them
The season of giving begins now
While you may be used to thinking of December as the season of giving, don’t wait until then to start advertising.
Start laying a solid foundation now and start making every season a gift.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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