Ultimate Guide To Paid Advertising For Nonprofits

Paid advertising for nonprofits is one of the most underutilized avenues of growth in the nonprofit world. Are you looking to grow your audience? Add new email subscribers? Get more traffic to a donation page?

Paid ads can help.

In our latest ultimate guide, we are going over the most important things you need to know about paid advertising for nonprofits. Our goal is that you come away with the essential knowledge and are able to make a better informed decision about paid ads as a result.

CLICK HERE FOR THE PDF VERSION OF THIS GUIDE

Let’s get started.

• Why Paid Advertising For Nonprofits Matters
• Understanding The Main Ad Platforms
• Paid Advertising For Nonprofits: Setting Goals
• Setting Up Your First Campaign
• Creating Ads That Convert
• Paid Advertising For Nonprofits: Our Tips
• How Nonprofits Can Maximize A Small Ads Budget
• Tools And Resources
• Conclusion

Why Paid Advertising For Nonprofits Matters

To understand why paid advertising is worth considering for your nonprofit, you need to take into account the general state of marketing. Just look at organic content. It’s great, and can build an audience, but it’s just not enough anymore.

Between social media algorithm changes and email list fatigue, it’s never been harder to reach your audience. These days, your messaging only reaches a fraction of your audience.

But paid ads?

They give you control. You choose who sees your message, which platform they see it on, when they see it, and the action they’re prompted to take. Plus, you can start small. Even just a few hundred dollars a month in paid ads can help with a variety of goals.

And the best part? Ads are trackable. Set up the right system, and you can see clearly what’s working, what’s not, and make decisions based on data instead of guesswork.

Understanding The Main Ad Platforms

When it comes to paid advertising for nonprofits, there are only a few platforms you really need to focus on. That said, they all have their specific benefits.

Here’s a quick breakdown of all of them:

Meta Ads

• Best for: Visual storytelling, donor re-engagement, list building, retargeting
• Targeting: Interests, age, behavior, location, lookalike audiences
• Good for your nonprofit if: you create engaging visuals and have clear calls-to-action

Google Ads

• Best for: Capturing people actively searching for help, services, or information
• Targeting: Keywords, location, device type
• Good for your nonprofit if: you want to raise awareness and target specific donation keywords

YouTube Ads

• Best for: Storytelling and broad awareness
• Targeting: Interests, demographics, video topics
• Good for your nonprofit if: You are investing in video content and you have time to test

LinkedIn Ads

• Best for: Corporate partnerships, thought leadership, policy advocacy
• Targeting: Interests, demographics, video topics
• Good for your nonprofit if: you work in B2B, you want to reach other professionals, or you are looking to invest in thought leadership

For a larger breakdown of how these platforms differ for nonprofits, be sure to check out best practices for each one. This will give you a better idea of which platform is the right fit for you.

Paid Advertising For Nonprofits: Setting Goals

Before you spend a cent on paid ads, you need to understand your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Paid ads can help with a variety of things, but trying to do them all at once will backfire.

Here are the most common goals for nonprofit ads:

• Raising donations
• Growing an email list
• Promoting an upcoming event
• Communicating with lapsed donors
• Recruiting new volunteers for your organization
• Raising awareness in a new region or community

Our advice to you: pick one primary goal per campaign. This makes it easier to build everything you need (targeting, creatives, landing page) around a specific focus.

Setting Up Your First Campaign

In this section we give you the general process you need to go through to start your first ad campaign for your nonprofit. The exact steps will differ widely depending on your exact plan for paid advertising.

That said, this is the general path to keep in mind:

1. Set your goal. As we said above, there are plenty of goals you might consider, but some of the most common ones include: increasing donations, raising awareness, and recruiting volunteers.
2. Choose your platform. Like we’ve already mentioned, most paid advertising for nonprofits will take place on one of four platforms. Figure out the one that is the best match with your organization for the best results.
3. Define your audience. Who do you want to see your ad? Most platforms will give you a ton of different parameters that you can use for precise targeting.
4. Build your ad creative. This is arguably the most important step in effective paid advertising. More on this step in the next section.
5. Create a landing page. Often you will send traffic to a page where they can take an action. It’s important here to understand how exactly you create landing pages that convert.
6. Set your budget. While you will usually get better results (and learn more much quicker) with a higher budget, you can get started for as little as five dollars a day.
7. Launch and monitor. It’s important to stay on top of the ads you create. Get in this habit and you are able to spot things that need to be fixed (or edited) with minimal lag time.

Again, while the details will differ widely, these are the general steps in paid advertising for nonprofits. And even if the process feels a bit intimidating at first, here’s a our challenge to you:

• Choose one goal
• Pick Facebook or Google
• Launch a campaign for five dollars a day
• Run it for a month
• Track your results

For just $150 dollars, you will have officially begun with paid advertising for nonprofits. Often just getting started is the biggest barrier. Take the lessons from that month (and the new competence gained), and you will be ready for even bigger campaigns.

Creating Ads That Convert

While there are a ton of ads you can learn from, most of the successful ones typically follow the same format. Here it is:

• A good creative. Many ad experts consider the creative (the image or video you use) as the most important element of a paid ad. And they have a point: while good copywriting is essential, your ad creative is what gets people to stop scrolling. In the nonprofit world, this will often be a human face.
• A real story. The most engaging nonprofit ads will usually tell some kind of story. This is what gets people interested, invested in your cause, and more likely to take the action you are requesting.
• Clear benefit or urgency. Why should people act now? Leave things open-ended, and people won’t take action. This is just simple human psychology at work.
• Simple language. Nobody ever took action because they were confused. No matter what your goal with your ad is, keep it as simple as possible. This lets people see who you are, what this ad is about, and why they should take action. And lastly:
• A direct call-to-action. Be clear here about what happens when they take action. Are they joining your email list? Going to a donation page? Signing up for an event? “Direct as possible” is the way to go here.

Now that you know what a good ad will usually look like for nonprofits, here are our main tips for creating ones that drive your goals:

Paid Advertising For Nonprofits: Our Tips

Simple wins.

If there is a golden rule to paid advertising for nonprofits, this is probably it. The best ads will almost always be the simplest. Why? Because the simplest are the easiest to understand. And when people understand, they are more likely to take action. Same thing with your creatives. You don’t need fancy pictures for your ads to perform well; you need clear, well-targeted messaging.

Track everything.

You should treat paid advertising for nonprofits as a learning lab. No use launching a campaign if “launching” is all you are going to do. You need to actually learn what works – and you can only do that by checking your numbers.

Here are your metrics to watch:

• CTR (Click-Through Rate): How engaging is your ad?
• CPC (Cost Per Click): How efficient is your spend?
• Conversions: Are people taking the action you wanted (donating, signing up, etc.)?
• Frequency: Are people seeing your ad too many times?

Get to know ad metrics. Every minute you spend learning about this topic is a minute

Constantly test.

A/B testing is how you gradually learn what works – and what doesn’t. Here a few tests that will quickly give you an idea of which direction to take:

• One image vs. another
• Emotional vs. data-driven headline
• Copy in the ad itself
• Different CTAs (“Donate now” vs. “See how you can help”)

The point of all this testing? Even small tweaks can massively change your results.

Don’t target too broadly.

In the past, you had to nail the perfect targeting if you wanted to run ads successfully. But now? Platforms are getting better at showing your ads to the perfect audience. Still, it’s helpful to be more specific about who you show your ad to. A rookie mistake? Thinking that “more people” equals more conversions. This is almost never the case.

Follow up

Paid advertising for nonprofits usually results in an action from someone. They donate to your cause, join your list, or sign up for an event. Regardless, you usually have their contact information after this. A missed opportunity is to let the relationship die there. The fact is, once people have taken one action, they are far more likely to take another. Follow up with them!

Pause what’s not working, and scale what is.

Usually, the organization that can iterate the fastest will win with paid ads. There are two parts to this fast iteration:

• Seeing what’s not working and pausing it. Remember: you are paying for this. If you let something run that just isn’t working, it’s costing you wasted dollars.
• Seeing what is working and scaling it. When you find a creative, angle, or targeting that works – run with it. (Just be sure you scale the ad spend correctly)

Master both of these things, and paid advertising for nonprofits becomes much easier.

Take advantage of the Google Ad Grant.

One of the “quickest wins” nonprofits can take advantage of is the Google Ad Grant. Here is what you need to know:

• The Google Ad Grant gives nonprofits up to $10,000/month in free search advertising
• Organizations that apply for it must stay compliant with Google’s requirements
• Keywords must be mission-related and relevant (not just “donate now”)
• It only works for search ads (not display or YouTube)

Overall, if you are looking to get started with paid advertising for nonprofits, but you don’t want to spend a ton of money doing it, this grant can be a great option. Most importantly: just make sure you follow Google’s rules!

How Nonprofits Can Maximize A Small Ads Budget

Most nonprofits, if they do decide to branch out into paid ads, will start with a small budget. Because of that, we thought it was important enough to have its own section.

You don’t need $5,000/month to make paid ads work. But you do need the right plan. Here are a few tips to stretch a smaller budget:

Tips for maximizing a small budget:

• Start local. Showing your ad to the entire country isn’t an effective form of targeting. Start with people in your area first (especially if you are trying to get people to sign up for your event).
• Repurpose your best-performing content. You likely already have a ton of content you have made. Want a guaranteed top performer? Just use the content people have already proven they like as your creative.
• Use lookalike audiences. This tip is important because it helps you show your ads to the people most likely to be interested in them. Just take your donor or email list and create a “lookalike audience” based on that information.
• Use retargeting for past site visitors. While slightly more sophisticated, retargeting ads are important because they maximize your budget. By showing your ads to people who have already visited your site, every dollar you spend on paid advertising is more effective as a result.

Act on just a few of these things, and even a smaller ads budget can get great results.

Tools And Resources

Paid advertising for nonprofits can feel overwhelming. Here are some of our top recommendations for tools and resources that will help you with the process.

1) Meta Ads Manager

Out of every platform nonprofits could use for ads, we would usually recommend Meta. This platform is great for visual storytelling, donor events, comes with precise targeting, and is relatively easy to use.

2) Google Ad Grants

See our last tip above regarding Google Ad Grants. Overall this is a powerful way to increase visibility on Google Search, and is especially useful if you are targeting mission-driven keywords.

3) Canva

If you don’t have a design team, Canva is one of the best tools out there for making eye-catching visuals. Use is to design not only ads, but your visuals for landing pages as well.

4) Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a powerful tool. It not only helps you organize organic social media posts, but makes it easy to schedule and monitor paid campaigns as well. While relatively robust, Hootsuite is a great consideration for nonprofits that are serious about paid ads.

5) Mailchimp

Our last tool recommendation is all about email. While clearly not primarily for ads, as we mention above, it’s important to stay in contact with new contacts that you make through your campaigns. Mailchimp, one of the most well-known ESP’s out there, is a great way to do it.

Conclusion

Paid advertising for nonprofits doesn’t have to be intimidating or expensive. You just need to act on the right plan – and we hope this ultimate guide has given you that plan.

No matter what your goal is at your nonprofit, paid ads are a skillset worth investing in. Come back to this guide often, take action, and let us know if you ever need any help!

CLICK HERE FOR THE PDF VERSION OF THIS GUIDE

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