Ad Grants
5x
average donation value
89%
decrease in cost per conversion
$15k
donations raised over 90 days
As an organization that has sponsored 51,000 volunteers to work more than one million volunteer hours, All Hands and Hearts relies on charitable giving to fund disaster relief trips to communities all over the world that are recovering from natural disasters. In September, 2018, Hurricane Florence flooded North and South Carolina in North America, so the organization sprung to quick action, raising over $450,000 from more than 1,000 donors online.
All Hands and Hearts needed to raise money quickly, and wanted to use Google Ads automated bidding to increase both conversion values and volume for their fundraising campaign. Concerned citizens searched Google for ways to help those affected by Florence, so the organization needed to be in top results for the increased search volume. In order to use the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy, All Hands and Hearts needed to install conversion tracking on their Classy.org fundraising tools.
Classy.org offers a no-code-required way to track advertising effectiveness via Google Analytics and Google Ads. All Hands and Hearts was advised by Community Boost Consulting to install transaction-specific conversion tracking on Classy.org tools as a first step. Once the organization was tracking each unique donation online, they could start to train their Ad Grants accounts to attract more and higher value online donors. Their next step was to enable the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy, on both their branded search term campaigns as well as their campaign for Hurricane Florence.
All Hands and Hearts ran one campaign for Hurricane Florence using the Maximize Clicks bidding strategy, and another using Maximize Conversions. Both campaigns tracked donation values for each conversion via the Classy.org fundraising platform.The campaign using Maximize Conversions raised 39% more dollars, at just 11% of the cost per conversion of the other campaigns. The average donation value using Maximize Conversions was five times that of those driven by Maximize Clicks. Additionally, over the 90 days since All Hands and Hearts started tracking donation values and using automated bidding, all campaigns saw an increase of 109% in conversions. Conversion rates for all campaigns went up from 6.1% to 10.3%, and All Hands and Hearts has gone on to raise $15,000 from visits driven by Google Ad Grants.
Automated, conversion-based bidding helped All Hands and Hearts raise money quickly and effectively for Hurricane Florence, and has been used by other nonprofits to save time and budget in their Ad Grants account. Cameron Ripley, CEO of Community Boost Consulting, said: “Utilizing Maximize Conversions has dramatically increased results for our over 100 nonprofit Google Ad Grants accounts here at Community Boost. Sometimes I can’t help but daydream about how many lives are being saved or enriched by this amazing marketing tactic.” To get started with your own Ad Grants account, follow the steps in the Ad Grants Conversion Tracking Guide. If you use Classy.org as your donation payment processor, the steps to track donations can be found here.
“Digital marketers for nonprofits wear many hats and operate with a very lean team. This means that it's often hard to be a subject matter expert in digital analytics. With the Classy.org and Google integration, we can better see the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns and have takeaways for the future.”Huan Song, Digital Channels Manager at All Hands and Hearts
