Part II: “I” is for interns (And volunteers. And employees. But let’s start with interns, because it makes the acronym work).
(In case you missed it: Part I: L Is For List-Building).
One of the most frequently overlooked ways to take advantage of Google Ad Grants is to use it as a recruiting tool. Sure, everyone wants monetary donations, but what about donations of time and effort? Often, alongside the need for money is the need for people to chip in a few hours here and there, and Ad Grants can help with that as well.
Internships are a fascinating opportunity in the digital age. If you live near a college, you can rest assured that there are hundreds of students looking for an internship to bolster their résumés. But don’t stop there.
Even if you don’t live near a college, you’re still in the game if you have work that can be done by “virtual” interns; that is to say, students from across the country, or even around the globe, who can do work for you and get that same résumé entry – without ever having to step foot in your office. If the nearby college has hundreds of internship-seeking students, those hundreds become hundreds of thousands when you broaden your focus to the whole country or even the entire globe.
Volunteers: In almost every geographic area where our agency has ever advertised, there is search volume for queries relating to local volunteering opportunities. (“Search volume” simply means that there’s a decent number of people searching for a particular query. For example, “Kim Kardashian Instagram photos” has VERY high search volume. By contrast, “Josh Barsch Instagram photos” has no search volume whatsoever.)
You may not realize it, but there are a lot of people in your community who would love to keep themselves busy with some volunteer work but simply don’t know which organizations need the help. Some don’t even know where to start looking, and that’s what has them on Google searching for things like “volunteer opportunities.”
You can bid on these keywords, and you should! There isn’t a warmer audience from which to recruit potential helpers than people who are searching for volunteer opportunities on Google at this very moment. They’re aching to put their free time to use by helping organizations like yours!
Remember, the highest-performing ads will directly address the query that users have typed into Google. So if your user has just entered “volunteer opportunities in Memphis,” your ad should say something like this:
Volunteer With Us In Memphis. We Need Lots Of Volunteers!
We’re Recruiting Volunteers For Agencies All Over Memphis. Apply Today!
Or how about:
Memphis Volunteers Wanted. You Can Apply Today!
Complete A Quick Form & Background Check & Start Volunteering Now.
Both of these are ads that you can reasonably presume will be attractive to people who are searching for volunteering-related keywords.
Employees: At the very moment I’m hitting the “publish” button here, the American economy is in severe distress as COVID-19 rampages across the globe. One day, it will be going gangbusters once again. But rest assured that in either of those scenarios and in all scenarios in between, people will be looking for jobs, and they’ll be looking for them on Google. Thus, if your nonprofit is hiring for positions of any kind, you can absolutely use your Ad Grant to advertise these job openings.
And trust us: Ads about job openings will drive significant traffic to your site. Some of the most effective campaigns we’ve ever run for our nonprofits at StraightForward are help-wanted campaigns for positions ranging from entry-level clerical help all the way up to highly skilled health care positions requiring specialized graduate degrees.
And the best part? The marketing cost to fill the positions is zero. Just a little bit of free advertising credit can do the job just fine. Thanks, Google!
— Josh Barsch is the CEO of StraightForward Interactive and the author of The Google Ad Grants Playbook: The Definitive Guide To Explosive Nonprofit Growth on Google’s Dime.