A Guide to Nonprofit Paid Advertising

Nonprofit organizations are gearing up for the next year, looking for ways to raise awareness and drive donations to support their mission. While inbound marketing through social media is still valuable, nonprofit outbound marketing like paid advertising has become a key strategy for reaching broader audiences, especially when budgets are limited.

Paid advertising like Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn and Programmatic advertising offer nonprofits a cost-effective way to reach highly targeted audiences with the right message to increase reach and drive the right actions.

Here are a few paid advertising options available to nonprofits:

1. Google Ads

Nonprofits should take advantage of the Google program called Google Ad Grants which provides up to $10,000/month in free advertising for eligible nonprofit groups. With a Google Ad Grant account, nonprofits can run Google Search ads targeting relevant keywords when users are searching for topics related to their mission. According to Nonprofits Source, search ads have the highest ROI of any paid advertising channel at $4.78. With this grant, you can dramatically reduce your spending on advertising and reach new, interested audiences more easily.

While this program is free, it is highly advised to entrust your agency partner to manage and optimize your Google Ads campaigns to fully utilize the grant, as Google does have specific restrictions and requirements on these types of accounts.

2. Meta/Instagram and LinkedIn Ads

With millions of users across Meta and Instagram, these platforms are invaluable for nonprofits looking to engage with a wide audience. With the advanced targeting these platforms provide, Meta and Instagram can serve ads based on interests, age, location and behavior. Campaign and message strategies should include brand awareness, fundraising/event promotions, and community engagement on days like GivingTuesday.

LinkedIn is particularly useful for nonprofits aiming to engage with a professional audience. LinkedIn Ads can be a great way to reach key decision-makers, potential corporate sponsors, or people interested in corporate social responsibility.

3. Programmatic Advertising

Ensure the media mix includes programmatic advertising like Connected TV, Online Video, and Display advertising. These types of campaigns use first-party data and machine learning to target the right audience, delivering attributable results while ensuring budget efficiency. Ask your agency partner to include retargeting in your campaign strategy. Retargeting allows you to target users that have visited and interacted with your website. This is a good strategy to reach those who have abandoned donations.

Case Study and Conclusion

SilverBack Advertising's nonprofit partner looked to expand public brand awareness, donation, volunteer-to-donor conversion and event leads. To address these goals, SilverBack Advertising built a dual-strategy omni-channel media plan with placements on our programmatic platform Data Fusion, Meta, and LinkedIn. We built the Data Fusion campaigns with focus on Connected TV and Online Video for a branding approach, and Display and Native Video to push conversions and donations. Meta and LinkedIn campaigns focused on branding and conversion strategies, delivering specific messaging to a highly targeted audience.

We utilized first party data, geo-targeting, job-based targeting and behavioral targeting to drive donor conversion, community event leads and current volunteer-to-donor conversion.

As a result, our nonprofit partner saw a 65% increase in unaided awareness and a 29% rise in familiarity with its mission. Sentiment towards corporate support improved by 4%, while the likelihood to donate remained stable with a slight increase.

The campaigns garnered 39.5 million impressions, over 200,000 clicks, 115 donations, and over 40,000 website visits.

These metrics reflect stronger public recognition and understanding, a more favorable public perception of the organization, and growing engagement..

Are you a nonprofit looking for an agency partner to help spread word of your mission? Contact SilverBack Advertising today!