Nonprofit marketing when donors and volunteers want opposite things
Nonprofit marketing serves two audiences that behave nothing alike. A donor searches your name and wants evidence the money worked. A volunteer searches a cause and a place. Build separate pages for each.
Your donor already knows who you are. They typed your name and want one thing: proof that last year's money did something. If the newest impact figure on the site is from 2022, they go back to the email.
Your volunteer has never heard of you. They searched a cause and a county, found nine organisations, and want to know whether the commitment is two hours on a Saturday or two years on a committee. Different page, different button.
We are a web development company based in Lewes, Delaware. We hold no charitable status and we bill like any other vendor. Monthly search work is newer here than the build work, and there is no charity case study to point at.
More on this:our nonprofit website design and build work·what a monthly SEO retainer includes·SEO for a site already built on WordPress·get a scope and a monthly figure back
Where the website works against you
One page for two audiences
The homepage asks a stranger for money and a committed donor for a shift. Both bounce.
A donate page on somebody else's domain
Your giving page sits on a subdomain run by Classy, Givebutter or Donorbox. Every link it earns builds someone else's property.
Impact buried in a PDF
The evidence a donor came for is in a PDF. Google reads the file, but nobody scrolls to page 19 of an annual report for one number.
Free ad traffic nobody separates
Ad Grants clicks pour into GA4 unlabelled. Organic looks like it is working when the free ads do all of it.
What the work covers
Separate donor and volunteer paths
Two page trees, two keyword sets, two buttons. The donor page answers where the money goes and who audits it. The volunteer page answers hours and checks.
Impact numbers lifted out of the PDF
We move your annual report figures into HTML on a page of their own, each with its year and a source link. A copyable number beats a downloaded one.
Ad Grants set up so it is measurable
Google Ad Grants gives eligible nonprofits 10,000 dollars a month of Search ads, metered as 329 dollars a day. Accounts opened since April 2019 must run conversion based Smart bidding, Maximize Conversions or Target CPA, and Google does not hold those to the manual bid cap people quote at you.
Local pages where volunteers search
Volunteer queries carry a place name far more often than donor queries, so: a page per chapter or county.
Reporting a board will actually read
Impressions, clicks, form completions and which pages preceded a gift, from your own accounts.
In every month
- A URL by URL audit of which pages serve donors and which serve volunteers
- Governance, financials and board pages made findable, current and linked
- Structured data using the schema.org NGO type on the organisation page
- Monthly reporting from your own Search Console and GA4 property, with access held in your name
- A quarterly review written for trustees rather than for other marketers
Two audiences, two sets of pages
How the retainer runs here
Month one is about separation. We work out which URLs serve donors, which serve volunteers, and which are trying to do both, then split the ones that are trying to do both. Usually the homepage and one other.
From month two the two tracks run at different speeds. Volunteer pages are local and comparatively easy, so they ship first and they are where any early movement will show. Donor acquisition through search is slow and mostly brand led, because somebody has to hear about you elsewhere before they type your name. We will say which your budget is actually buying.
Grant funders search you too, and almost nobody plans for it. A programme officer reads your site before a call, so the governance page, the 990, the board list and the audited accounts must be findable and current. An afternoon of work, never on anyone's plan.
Now for the part most agencies would rather skip. If your annual budget is small and your Ad Grants account is not running, spend a quarter on that before you spend a dollar on nonprofit marketing from anybody. Ten thousand dollars a month of free Search inventory beats anything a retainer our size would buy.
- Donor and volunteer work tracked and reported separately
- Fixed monthly hours, thirty days notice, no annual lock in
- Ad Grants clicks tagged so they never inflate organic
- Draft copy goes to your comms lead before anything publishes
The first quarter
- 01
Week one, the split
Every page gets labelled donor, volunteer, funder or housekeeping. Pages carrying two labels get fixed first, because they convert neither audience well.
- 02
Week two, the giving path
We trace what happens between a donation button and a receipt, including which domain the form lives on and what the redirect does to attribution. Most of the measurement gets lost right here.
- 03
Week three, Ad Grants
If the account exists we audit it against Google's published policies. If not, we tell you how to apply and what it demands every month afterwards.
- 04
Month two onward
Volunteer and programme pages ship first, one or two a month, written with the person running each. Donor side work runs alongside, judged over quarters.
- 05
Every quarter, the trustee call
One page, plain language, comparing the quarter against the month one baseline. If the retainer is not earning its cost, the page says so.
What nonprofit marketing costs here
Whether the money is restricted
Restricted programme funding cannot pay a marketing retainer, so this work competes with core costs and a board has to approve it as such. Knowing that before we quote saves a month.
How many programmes you run
One programme is one page tree. Six programmes in four counties is twenty four combinations, and deciding which deserve a page is most of the work.
Whether Ad Grants is live
An active grant account changes the retainer's shape, because compliance work is monthly and unavoidable. A suspended account takes longer to revive than to set up.
Who writes
If your communications lead can write a programme page from an outline, the retainer is smaller. If every word comes from us, it is not.
The Ad Grants rule that quietly eats your organic clicks
Ad Grants accounts have to hold a 5 percent click through rate, and it is two consecutive months under it that deactivates the account, not one bad month. That pressure pushes every grantee towards bidding on their own charity name, because brand queries convert best. Your free ads then take clicks the organic listing already had, and the board reads a glowing ad report beside flat total traffic. Exclude brand terms, watch total sessions rather than channel sessions, and the picture stops lying.
Sources:Google's published Ad Grants budget and bidding figures·the Ad Grants account management policy and its 5 percent click through rule
Three things decide this, and you already know all three: the URL, your annual budget band, and whether the Ad Grants account is live. Send those and you get one email back saying whether a retainer is worth it to you, or whether two named fixes and the free ad inventory would do more.
If the answer is the free inventory, that is what you will be told, and nobody here will chase you afterwards. A board that spends restricted money on the wrong thing has a harder conversation ahead than we do.
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Questions boards ask
What does nonprofit marketing actually mean?+
For most organisations it is three jobs wearing one name: keeping existing donors giving, reaching people who never heard of you, and recruiting volunteers. Search work serves the second and third. Retention is email, post and relationships, and no website rescues it.
How much should a nonprofit spend on marketing?+
There is no defensible benchmark, and the percentages you see quoted rarely trace to a primary source. A better test is whether you can name what the last thousand dollars bought. If not, the next thousand goes on measurement before activity.
Do nonprofits get free Google Ads?+
Eligible organisations receive up to 10,000 dollars a month of in kind Search advertising through Google Ad Grants, metered at 329 dollars a day. Keeping it means a 5 percent click through rate, one conversion a month, and conversion based Smart bidding on newer accounts.
How do we get more volunteers through the website?+
Answer the four things people hesitate over: how long a shift is, whether training is provided, whether a background check is required, and who they will be with. Put those on a page per location, because volunteer queries almost always carry a place name.
Should our donate page sit on our own domain?+
On your own domain where the platform supports it, because links and traffic then build the site you control. Several processors serve the form on a path of your domain rather than a subdomain. If yours cannot, make analytics follow the visitor across.