Charities & Nonprofits marketing
The donor and the person you help are not the same reader
One website is asked to convince a donor that a problem is urgent, and to help somebody living inside that problem find support without being made to feel like evidence. Those are opposite pieces of writing, and grant policy constrains both.
Constraints
What the rules allow, and what they do not
Google Ad Grants is a policy environment before it is a budget. Eligibility depends on registered charitable status and excludes several categories of organisation outright, and the account itself carries rules commercial advertisers never meet: search-only placement, no single-word keywords, no keywords below a minimum quality score, mandatory geographic targeting, conversion tracking that has to record real conversions, and a click-through-rate floor that can put an account into deactivation. Policies change, so the current rules should be read at Google’s own documentation rather than taken from an agency deck, including ours.
Fundraising is separately regulated from charity registration in most markets. Depending on the country, and frequently the state or province, a charity may need to register before soliciting donations there, disclose specified information at the point of asking, follow a statutory or self-regulatory code of practice, and observe rules on approaching people who may be vulnerable. Where a professional fundraiser or third-party platform is involved, that relationship usually has to be disclosed too.
Statements about tax treatment are the easiest thing on a charity website to get wrong, because the answer differs for every country a donation might come from. Gift Aid, deductibility and receipting each have their own conditions, and copy that promises a donor a tax outcome they do not qualify for is a problem for the charity rather than for the donor. Say what the charity can substantiate, per jurisdiction, and no more.
Beneficiary content carries duties that fundraising content does not. Consent to be photographed or described has to be informed, recorded and withdrawable, safeguarding constrains what may be published about children and people at risk, and data protection rules treat much of what a charity holds about service users as sensitive. Dignity is also a sector standard rather than a preference: several fundraising codes address how the people a charity helps may be portrayed.
Campaigning has limits that ordinary advertising does not. Rules on political activity by charities, and on regulated periods around elections and referendums, restrict what may be published and spent in a number of jurisdictions. This is a matter for the charity and its own advisers, and we flag content that looks likely to need that check before it goes anywhere near a publication date.
What usually goes wrong
Where charity marketing tends to fail
A charity website is asked to do two incompatible jobs at once. It has to persuade a donor that a problem is urgent and that money will change it, and it has to help somebody living inside that problem find support without being made to feel like a case study.
Almost every difficulty that follows comes from those two jobs being run through one homepage, one tone and one set of pages, inside rules that most marketing advice ignores entirely.
- One homepage is serving donors, service users, volunteers and funders.
- Each of them arrived for a different reason and each is repelled by the messaging built for the others. A person looking for help does not want an appeal in front of the eligibility criteria. A donor does not want a service leaflet. A grant funder wants governance and evidence. The fix is structural rather than editorial: separate routes from the first click, with the service route carrying no fundraising ask at all.
- The Ad Grant account was set up once and left.
- It usually shows the same symptoms: a handful of ancient keywords, no conversion tracking that records anything real, ad groups that have been paused by policy, and a click-through rate below the level the programme requires. The grant is genuinely valuable when it is run as an account with rules, and worth nothing when it is treated as free money that arrives by itself.
- Almost everything raised is a one-off gift.
- A single donation is a transaction. A monthly gift is an annuity, and after eighteen months it is worth several times what the same donor gave once. Charities that judge appeals on total raised will keep picking the campaign that produces many single gifts over the one that produces fewer regular givers, and the shortfall only becomes visible in a later financial year.
- The people you exist to help cannot find the help.
- Service pages are frequently written in the language of the funding application — outcomes, cohorts, interventions — rather than the words somebody types at eleven at night. Whether it is free, who is eligible, whether it is confidential and what happens when you make contact are the four things that decide whether a person reaches out, and they belong in the first screen rather than the third page.
- Nobody can say what it costs to raise a pound, by channel.
- Fundraising cost is reported once a year, in aggregate, to satisfy the accounts. That tells a trustee board almost nothing about which channel to fund next year. Cost per regular giver recruited, cost per pound of first-year income, and the proportion of donors still giving after twelve months are the numbers that make a budget decision defensible, and they are rarely being collected.
- Legacy giving is never mentioned because it feels intrusive.
- It is the largest gift most charities will ever receive, and the people who make it are usually long-standing supporters who simply needed to know it was possible. A plain page about how a gift in a will works, what wording a solicitor needs and what such gifts have paid for is low-pressure, useful, and absent from a remarkable number of charity websites.
Buying behaviour
How your customers actually decide
Strategy follows this, not the other way round. Everything on this page is downstream of how the decision genuinely gets made.
- A donor is usually prompted by something specific — a diagnosis, a bereavement, a news story, a friend fundraising — and the charity they choose is often the first credible one that meets that moment properly.
- Trust is checked quickly and superficially: a registration number, a real address, named trustees, recent accounts and some evidence the money does what the appeal said it would.
- Many donors look for the proportion of income spent on the cause, and will judge on it whether or not that is a fair measure. A charity that explains its own cost structure plainly does better than one that leaves the figure to be found elsewhere.
- Regular giving is decided once and reviewed almost never, which makes the acquisition moment unusually valuable and makes a poorly designed donation flow unusually expensive.
- Corporate partnerships and charity-of-the-year decisions are frequently settled by an employee vote, so being recognisable and easy to explain internally matters more than the quality of the partnership proposal.
- Grant funders and commissioners choose on evidence, governance and delivery history, and they read the website as due diligence before any conversation begins.
- A person looking for help chooses on entirely different grounds: whether it is free, whether they are eligible, whether it is confidential, how quickly they can be seen, and whether they will be judged.
Search behaviour
What your customers are typing
Donor intent
Prompted by a specific event and usually acted on within a short window. Generic terms are contested; cause-specific and moment-specific ones rarely are.
- donate to [cause] charity
- best charity for [cause] uk
- how much of my donation goes to the cause
- charity christmas gift in someone’s name
- leave a gift in my will to charity
Someone looking for help
Written in plain, often anxious language, frequently late at night. These searches must never land on a page that asks for money.
- free debt advice near me
- [condition] support group [town]
- help with food this week [area]
- is [service] confidential
- who can i talk to about [problem] free
Volunteers and supporters
A steady, low-cost source of both help and future donors, and usually served by a single page that answers almost none of the practical questions.
- volunteer opportunities near me weekends
- charity shop volunteering [town]
- fundraising ideas for [cause]
- sponsored run for charity [city]
Funders, companies and due diligence
Low volume, high value, and read as evidence rather than as marketing. These visitors are checking whether you are safe to be associated with.
- [charity name] annual report
- charity of the year partner [city]
- corporate volunteering days [region]
- charity number lookup [name]
- grant funded projects [cause] evidence
These are examples of how customers in this market search, drawn from keyword research and from the questions that come up on sales calls. They are illustrative, not a volume claim — the actual demand in your area is something we size before recommending anything.
Where the money goes
The channels that earn their place here
In priority order for this business, not a menu. Anything not on this list is something we would need a specific reason to recommend.
The grant account run to policy, plus the terms it cannot win
Rebuilding a grant account so it survives the programme rules — geographic targeting, tracked conversions, keywords that clear the quality threshold and a click-through rate above the floor — and then being honest about where the grant cannot compete. A small paid account alongside it, on the handful of terms that genuinely matter, is often the better use of restricted budget.
Help written in the words people actually type
Service content that answers eligibility, cost, confidentiality and what happens next, in plain language and near the top of the page. This is also, incidentally, the content that earns the authority a donor checks, which is why it usually outperforms the campaign microsite it was passed over for.
A donation flow that does not lose people at the last step
Suggested amounts tied to something concrete and true, a monthly option presented as the default where that is appropriate, a form that completes on a phone in well under a minute, and a receipt and thank-you that treat the donor as a person. This is usually a larger source of income than any additional media spend.
Supporter email that is not only appeals
A supporter who hears from you only when you want money will lapse. What holds people is evidence of what the last gift did, an honest account of what is difficult, and an occasional route into something other than donating — volunteering, sharing, or asking about a gift in a will. The regular giving base is built and kept here.
Coverage earned on evidence you already hold
Charities usually sit on data nobody else has — demand for a service, regional variation, what changed after an intervention — and it is genuinely newsworthy when it is presented carefully. Coverage of that kind reaches donors, funders and the people who need the service at once, and it produces the authority that makes everything else work.
The website
What the site has to do for this customer
- A route for people seeking help that is reachable from the first screen and carries no donation ask at all
- Eligibility, cost, confidentiality and what happens after contact, stated at the top of every service page
- A donation flow that completes on a phone in under a minute, with a regular giving option given real prominence
- Suggested gift amounts tied to something concrete the charity can actually evidence
- Registration number, registered address, trustees and the most recent accounts, findable in one step
- Tax and receipting information written separately for each country the charity accepts donations from
- A plain page on gifts in wills, including the wording a solicitor needs and what such gifts have funded
- Volunteering pages that answer time commitment, location, checks required and how to start
- Photographs and stories used with recorded consent, with a published policy on how people are portrayed
- Pages that work on an old phone, a slow connection and a screen reader, because a great many service users have all three
Measurement
What we report on, and what we ignore
Sessions are not on this list. These are the numbers that tell you whether the marketing is producing customers.
- Regular givers recruited, and the proportion still giving after twelve months
- Cost to raise a pound, reported by channel rather than as one annual figure
- Average gift and total raised per appeal, stated net of what it cost to run
- Second gift rate among first-time donors, the earliest sign that a supporter relationship exists
- Legacy enquiries and pledges recorded, however long the horizon
- Service users reaching the right page and making contact, counted only where it is safe and lawful to do so
- Volunteer applications completed rather than started, and the proportion who go on to a first shift
- Corporate partnership and grant enquiries received through the site, tracked to a decision
Questions
Questions we get from this industry
Is the Google Ad Grant enough on its own?
Rarely. The grant is a constrained account: search only, no single-word keywords, a minimum quality threshold, mandatory geographic targeting and a click-through-rate floor that can deactivate an account that falls below it.
Run properly it is real value and worth the effort. But there are terms the grant will not win, and for those a small paid account is a better use of money than another month of trying to force the grant to do something its rules prevent. Check the current policy at Google’s own documentation before planning around any of it.
Should donors and service users share a website?
They can share a domain. They should not share a page, a tone or a journey. A person looking for help who meets an appeal before they reach the eligibility criteria frequently does not come back.
The practical structure is a clearly signposted route from the first screen, service content with no fundraising ask anywhere in it, and donor content that never uses a service user as a persuasion device without their informed consent.
How do we move from one-off gifts to regular giving?
Change what you measure first. A campaign judged on total raised will always favour a large number of single gifts, and the monthly donor is worth far more over any reasonable horizon.
Then change the ask. Present the monthly option with equal or greater prominence, tie the amount to something specific and true, and make the first year of supporter communication about what the money did rather than about the next appeal. Report cost per regular giver recruited and the twelve-month retention figure to your board.
Can we use photographs and stories of the people we help?
Only with informed, recorded, withdrawable consent, and even then not always. Safeguarding, data protection and sector fundraising codes all bear on this, and consent given during a crisis is not reliable consent.
Where consent is not available or appropriate, the alternatives are usually stronger than people expect: an anonymised composite clearly labelled as such, the words of a staff member or volunteer, or the charity’s own data about need. None of them require a person to trade their privacy for your income.
December is most of our income. What should we be doing in June?
Building the base that December depends on. Regular giving recruitment, supporter email that is not an appeal, legacy information, and the service and evidence content that makes the charity findable and credible when the giving season arrives.
It is also the right time to fix the mechanics — the donation flow, the grant account, the tracking — because doing any of that in late November is how a good appeal gets undone by a checkout nobody tested.
Find out what is realistically winnable in your market
A strategy call is a working session on your charity business specifically — your area, your competitors, the searches that matter and what it would take to compete for them. If we do not think we can move it, we will tell you.
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Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal