Ten thousand a month is only worth having if it's working.
The Google Ad Grant gives eligible nonprofits up to $10,000 USD a month in free Search advertising. We manage grants so the spend goes to people who might actually become donors, volunteers or participants, and we report on that rather than on clicks.
Check your eligibilityFree advertising, with strings attached.
Ad Grants is genuinely generous: up to $10,000 USD every month, indefinitely, for eligible registered nonprofits. But it is text-only, Search-only, sits below fully paid ads in the auction, and comes with a set of policy obligations ordinary advertisers never encounter.
It also does not roll over. Whatever you do not use this month is gone. That is why a grant nobody is actively managing tends to be worth far less than the headline figure suggests.
Four failures, over and over.
Nobody actually owns it
The grant gets approved, someone builds a few campaigns in a burst of enthusiasm, and then it runs untouched for two years. Google keeps serving the ads, so nothing looks broken.
What it costs youMonths of free budget spent on whatever the account was guessing at in year one.
It chases whatever is cheapest to win
Broad, popular keywords are easy to rank for on a grant budget and produce impressive-looking numbers. They also bring in students, job seekers and researchers who were never going to support you.
What it costs youA dashboard full of conversions and no new donors, volunteers or participants.
Conversions were never really tracked
Google's own policy requires meaningful conversion tracking, but plenty of accounts run for years on micro-actions instead: a PDF download, time on page, a click to an email address.
What it costs youNo way to tell a campaign that works from one that only looks busy.
It drifts quietly into a policy breach
Ad Grants accounts carry rules ordinary paid accounts do not, covering click-through rate, keyword specificity, geo-targeting and account structure.
What it costs youThe account gets paused, and often nobody notices for weeks.
Set it up properly, then keep it honest.
Eligibility and application
We confirm you qualify, get you through Google for Nonprofits validation, and submit the Ad Grants application. If your charitable registration or website will fail the review, you find out from us first rather than from a rejection weeks later.
Work out what a conversion actually is
This is the step that decides whether the grant is worth anything. A donation, a volunteer sign-up, a programme registration, a booked visit. We define the actions that matter to your organization and set up tracking that records them properly before a single ad runs.
Build the account around your mission
Campaigns structured against real programmes and real intent, not whatever is cheapest to win. Keywords chosen because the person searching could plausibly become a supporter, with the traffic that merely inflates numbers deliberately left out.
Stay compliant, quietly
Ad Grants accounts are suspended for failing rules most nonprofits have never read: click-through rate floors, conversion tracking requirements, keyword restrictions, geo-targeting. We monitor against Google's current policy so the account keeps running.
Report on outcomes, not activity
Monthly reporting on what the grant produced: enquiries, sign-ups, donations, registrations. Impressions and clicks are in there, but they are context, not the headline. If a campaign is not earning its place we say so and change it.
What an honest rebuild actually looks like.
We took over Ad Grant management for the Perry Institute for Marine Science, a marine conservation nonprofit working across the Caribbean, and found an account built to farm cheap, plentiful conversions that had nothing to do with the mission. Most of the budget was going to job postings, volunteer searches and education downloads rather than the donation and programme pages that needed it.
We rebuilt it around what the organization actually needed, and the reported numbers fell. That part is easy to describe and uncomfortable to look at, because a smaller number is what an honest rebuild looks like on a dashboard that was built to flatter.
Then we found the real problem. Their donation tracking had been silently broken. A JavaScript error in the post-donation snippet was stopping both the analytics event and the Google Ads conversion from ever firing, so actual donations were never being counted. Every number anyone had reported on was made of micro-actions instead. We root-caused it, fixed it, and only then could the account be pointed at the things that matter, donations and programme registrations, rather than PDF downloads and time on page.
Alongside that the account holds a 7 to 8% click-through rate, comfortably above the 5% floor Google requires to keep the full grant, and organic search impressions are up 56% year over year with average position moving from the bottom of page two to the top of page one.
Straight answers.
The Google Ad Grant gives eligible nonprofit organizations up to $10,000 USD per month in free Google Search advertising. The ads appear alongside ordinary paid results, though they are text-only, run on Google Search rather than the Display network, and sit below fully paid ads in the auction. The money cannot be moved to another channel and does not roll over, so any month you do not use it, it is simply gone.
You need current charitable status in a country where the programme operates, a Google for Nonprofits account, and a functioning website you control on your own domain with a clear description of your mission and a valid secure connection. Governments, hospitals and healthcare organizations, and schools and academic institutions are excluded from Ad Grants, though universities may qualify for other Google for Nonprofits programmes. Google publishes the current eligibility criteria and it is worth checking them directly, since they are updated from time to time.
Usually because nobody owns it. The account gets set up during a burst of enthusiasm, then runs unattended. The common failure modes are the same ones we see in most audits: keywords chosen because they are easy to win rather than because the searcher might support you, no conversion tracking so nothing can be judged, and slow drift into a policy breach nobody notices. None of that is a reflection on the organization. It is a specialist job that rarely has an owner.
Ad Grants accounts carry obligations ordinary paid accounts do not. Google's policy covers a minimum account-level click-through rate, a requirement to have meaningful conversion tracking in place, restrictions on very general and single-word keywords, minimum quality thresholds, geo-targeting, and account structure requirements. Failing them can get an account paused or, if left long enough, removed from the programme. The specifics change, so we monitor against Google's published Ad Grants policy rather than a remembered version of it.
Usually, yes. Suspension is normally the result of a policy breach that went unnoticed rather than anything serious, and reinstatement is a matter of finding the cause, fixing it, and going through Google's reactivation process. We will look at the account first and tell you honestly whether it is recoverable before you commit to anything.
It depends on whether search demand exists for what you do. If people are already looking for the problem you solve, the programme you run, or the place you work, the grant puts you in front of them at no media cost and is well worth the management. If almost nobody is searching in your area, the honest answer is that a $10,000 notional budget with nothing to spend it on is not a win, and we would rather tell you that than bill you to prove it slowly.
No. Most of our nonprofit clients have none, and that is fine. You bring the knowledge of your programmes, your audiences and what a genuinely valuable enquiry looks like. We handle the account, the compliance and the optimisation, and report in plain language rather than in advertising jargon.
Eligibility rules and account policies are Google's and change from time to time. We work against the current published Google Ad Grants policy rather than a remembered version, and we will always point you to the source.
Not sure whether
you qualify?
Tell us about your organization and we'll check eligibility and look at any existing account, before you commit to anything.
Ask us