It’s an interesting question. I assume motivated by a desire to maintain the positive perception of the foundation. I’m sure that it is for good reason that extra caution should be taken while guarding such a reputation. I can think of many examples of internet “neighborhoods” that I would not want to see my name. So do large foundations with esteemed reputations use Adwords?

Well, the largest in the world does. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is spending somewhere in the range of $4,000 monthly on Adwords ads. I tend to think with a substantial positive boost to their reputation. I find it hard to anticipate any harm coming to their reputation when people find their website as a result of searching for “Polio Research”, or “Global Health Issues”?

The Pew Charitable Trusts spend much more than that – looks like maybe as much as $10,000 monthly.

Likewise, I can only anticipate positive brand association resulting from being found in the search engines when someone searches for “How to Invest in Children” or “Global Warming Solutions”

I recently gave a presentation on Google Grants for nonprofits at the Bridge to Integrated Marketing and Fundraising Conference. You can access the full presentation on slideshare here: Google Grants Presentation

I really believe in following up with the people that I meet at the conferences and I thought it might be useful to provide you with an example of the follow up letter I wrote which contains links to a lot of my favorite Adwords tools which I find particularly useful for managing Google Grants.

It was great meeting you at the Bridge Conference. I’m glad that you enjoyed our presentation on Google Grants. It was fun talking to you afterwards and I’d love to keep in touch and over time we might find areas in which we can benefit each other. Let me know if there is anything I can do for you and in the meantime here are some of my favorite Adwords links:

Tracking and Segmentation

As I mentioned during the presentation I am a strong advocate of Google Analytics which is free and is very easy to set up. Although the initial implementation is very easy, making web analytics work for your organization can be challenging: defining key performance indicators, monthly reporting, and ongoing optimization is enough to keep anyone busy. One of my favorite blogs to help you get everything set up correct is ROI Revolution. They have some great information including how to get Google Analytics to track the exact keywords that trigger the broad match in Adwords. Of course this can be done with great pay software like Wordstream which is also a great time saver for segmenting your keywords at a pretty reasonable price ($100 Monthly) but I mostly want to just talk about free resources, since most of us have our money pretty tied up these days.

Large Campaign Management

For those who are managing large campaigns it is well worth the time to learn how to use Google Adwords Editor.  The latest version of this tool is free and very user friendly. There is a good Adwords Editor help section for when you do experience challenges using this tool. Use this tool along with Microsoft Excel and you will save yourself a huge amount of time and frustration over using the web interface. If you have a smaller campaign it might not be necessary to use the editor, but these things have a tendency to get large pretty quickly, especially if you do good keyword research.

Keyword Research Tools

Keyword research is the foundation of search marketing, so it is really important to know how to find out what queries your audience uses to find the products and services that you provide. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is usually regarded as the very best, although one challenge with this is the fact that this is the tool that everyone uses! Makes it a little bit more challenging to find opportunities and areas with less competition. The SEOBook Keyword Tool is a free tool based on WordTracker that provides a nice foil to the Adwords tool. I find it useful to get the SEOBook tool to find new phrases that weren’t initially listed in the Adwords tool – then you can plug those into the Adwords tool as well to get even more phrases. Another tool that is very useful is Google Insights. Google Insights allows you to compare search volume for different phrases. One of the reasons this tool is great is that it can also be used to find out where in the country people are searching for a phrase more. I always recommend this paper on search taxonomy which helps you to think clearly about the intent most people have when they use the search engines. Microsoft has put together a pretty impressive set of tools which they are calling adCenter Labs.

Keyword Permutations

Once you have your list of phrases you can usually combine the words differently to make even more phrases. You will also want to use the different match types that we discussed. While the implementation of this just involves adding brackets, quotes, or a negative sign, this can turn into a lot of work if you don’t have a handy tool like the Adwords Wrapper which will add the appropriate modifiers to a big list of keywords all at once.

Competitive Research

One last thing I wanted to touch on is competitive research tools which can be a great help. Most competitive research tools are pay tools so you’ll have to decide whether it makes sense for your needs. SpyFu was one of the first in depth tools I used for competitive research in Adwords. It will provide you with most of the phrases that your competitors are targeting as well as estimates of how much they’re paying per click and how much they are spending per day. SEMRush is the new tool in this category by the people who created the SEO Quake toolbar which is especially useful for doing quick competitive research for organic SEO.

I hope that you find these bookmarks useful and I hope that I get to present for you again. In the meantime if there is anything I can do for you please let me know. We offer Google Grant management services as well as Adwords marketing and Organic SEO. Eric Werner

There are various challenges associated with being a non-profit organization on the web, some internal and some tied to the very nature of the internet. With experience consulting to some of the world’s foremost nonprofit websites Nosamis.org is positioned to help you get the very most from your web development efforts.

With the emergence of the social web, marketing on the internet is different than has ever been in the past. We are riding on the wave of the new consumer revolution and free as a marketing strategy. Web analytics has changed the way we look at our audience and Adwords Marketing makes it possible to touch people in whatever location you choose instantly.

Fundraising for nonprofits is a challenge although there are some Atlanta Grants which you may apply for. If your nonprofit is making an impact within your community there is a great chance that you will be able to leverage these funds to continue to grow your constituency.

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