Author: DumDumBen

Did you know that non-profit organisations get access to great discounts and tools from companies like Google, Salesforce and Facebook?

Let me show you some of the best digital tools that are available for your charity.

Book a no-obligation consultation

Google Ad Grants

The Google Ad Grants programme gives you £7,000 per month to spend on Google Search Ads. That’s a whopping £84,000 per year of digital ad spending, for free.

There are some limitations. It’s only on search ads, so if you’ll need a second Google Ads account to run display ads through Google’s ad network or video ads on Youtube.

I’ve also found Google to be quite strict about the search terms you can run ads against. For most non-profits this shouldn’t be a problem, but for non-profits who earn revenue delivering the same services offered by private sector there may be some appeals to complete.

One nice problem to have with Google Ad Grants is apathy. It seems amazing, but when an organisation gets given an £84,000 asset for free, they often have no idea what to do with it. I regularly see ads and campaigns that haven’t been updated or reviewed since day one.

Google has a number of online courses to help you get to grips with Google Ads. Alternatively, hiring a professional to look after your £84,000 per year asset will pay for itself several times over.

Saving = £84,000 per year

Salesforce Power of Us

Salesforce is a powerful business platform that helps you run your non-profit more efficiently. It collects and manages your data, and helps connect staff, volunteers and everyone impacted by your work.

The Power of Us program gives non-profits access to ten free licences for Salesforce’s Sales & Service Cloud Enterprise Edition, as well as their Nonprofit Success Pack. The success pack is a ready-to-go set up that you can use straight away, and includes revenue management tools, analytics and reports.

Salesforce allows you to use your data better. Whether it’s more accurate donor records, service user logs or managing income generation, Salesforce keeps all your information in one place and turns it into actionable insights.

Salesforce can be accessed remotely through its mobile app or a browser. So work-from-homers have exactly the same insights as they would in the office. Salesforce’s data controls are second to none, with the ability to lock access to sensitive data to individuals or locations.

Despite what some actors may claim, you don’t have to hire an expensive specialist agency to set up your Salesforce instance. The Trailhead training programme is free and contains almost everything you could possibly need to know when you start using Salesforce.

Saving = £16,800 per year

Office Essentials

Whatever your non-profit does, you’ll be needing spreadsheets, word processing and emails.

And as a charity you don’t need to pay a penny for these essentials. Both Google and Microsoft supply non-profits with a free suite of in-browser office programmes, plus storage, calendars that synchronise across all of your devices, and email hosting with your web domain’s address. Which means there’s no excuse to be using a free Gmail or Hotmail account!

Microsoft also offer non-profits ten free licences for their Microsoft 365 Business Premium level subscription, with additional licences available for £3.80 per month.

Whether you decide to use Microsoft’s Office 365 or Google’s Workspace for Nonprofits depends on your organisation’s needs and the other services you use. Google’s Workspace integrates with other services better than Office, but most of your people will probably be more at home with Office.

If you’re looking to upgrade to a cloud office suite, consider auditing your present and future digital requirements. Some extra time spent now could save a fortune in the future.

Saving (Microsoft’s ten free licences) = £1,812 per year

Creative Heavyweights

Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of products includes market leading apps like Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects.

These enterprise level apps have everything you need to make your work pop! Whilst the learning curve with Adobe’s products is quite steep they provide a number of tutorials. They’re also well supported by their user community who actively answer questions and produce their own tutorials on YouTube.

Adobe’s charity pricing isn’t publically available, but it tends to be equivalent to their Student and Teacher pricing, which is over 65% off for the first year and half price after that.

Saving = £404.40 first year, £299.52 per year after

Email Marketing

Keep your supporters close with regular email communications. These free plans are available to everyone, but mean your non-profit has no excuse not to use email marketing to raise funds, and more importantly sharing what you achieve with these donations.

Both SendGrid and Mailchimp have built-in tools to help you stay the right side of GDPR and data protection rules.

Deciding between the two should depend on your non-profit’s skills and priorities. Mailchimp is the more user friendly of the two, and also has a mobile app where you can create emails on the go. SendGrid has more advanced features, and lets you send cleaner, more professional emails, as well as integrating more closely with your website.

Make more out of Facebook

Unfortunately Mark Zuckerburg isn’t as generous with advertising grants as Google is. If you want to run ads on Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp you’ll have to pay Mr Zuckerburg full price.

However, Facebook does still have some useful tools for charities.

One is the Donate button. This lets people donate to your organisation directly from your page or post. You can also allow your supporters to create fundraisers for your non-profit (Facebook prompts people to create these around their birthdays). Unlike other services like justgiving, you’ll receive 100% of the donation as Facebook covers all processing costs.

A unique tool Facebook provides for non-profits is Mentorship. A Facebook Group with Mentorship activated can foster one-to-one mentorships between group members, with members creating a profile and sharing what they’re offering or looking for in a mentorship.

Another free tool is Business Manager. This tool helps you manage all of the messages, comments and interactions people make with your page, and has a powerful post and story scheduling tool.

But the best asset your charity has on Facebook is its supporters. From creating the content you post to boosting your reach through sharing, your supporters are your secret weapon!

Charity Digital Exchange

Before you buy any software or service for your non-profit, check Charity Digital first. They work with loads of firms to deliver discounted or donated products to charities, as well as putting on events to help introduce you to the options available.

At time of writing the Charity Digital Exchange site is terrible to view and use, but persevere and you can make big savings on loads of products for your non-profit.

Power Up Your Non-Profit

Getting over £100,000 of top tier digital spending for free makes a real difference to cash-strapped non-profits. But having it available won’t be enough if you can’t claim or use it.

That’s why it’s worth finding a partner to help you maximise the impact of these digital tools.

Book a no-obligation consultation

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

I’ve really got into gardening during Covid. Monty Don’s on record, I’ve knocked up some raised beds and we’ve started growing seeds rescued from the chopping board.

And as often happens, the mixed results of my new greenery fascination got me thinking up a new analogy.

Websites are like gardens

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s my new favourite way to explain how digital growth works.

When someone first delivers your brand new shiny website, you love it. You show it off to your mates and your family. You’re well chuffed with it.

Which is just like having your garden done. It’s all planted, they’ve knocked up a little water feature, Charlie Dimmock’s mowed the lawn. It’s great. Let’s do a barbecue.

But now its three months down the line, and you haven’t done any gardening. The plants have died of thirst. There’s a dead pigeon floating in the pond.

It’s slightly different with websites. It’ll still look the same even if you don’t touch it for months. But it’ll still be dead. Nobody will be coming to look at it. It’ll be sliding slowly down those Google rankings until it hits Google Graveyard (page 2 of the search results).

Digital Gardening

If you want to keep your garden growing , you’ve got to shuffle about with a watering can and some shears.

And if you want to keep your website generating leads and sales, you’ve got to do some digital gardening.

The most important thing is to keep watering. For a garden, that means getting the hose out. For a website, it means getting people onto your site through your digital marketing channels.

There’s a few different ways to digitally water your website. Organic search traffic is everyone’s favourite. This is essentially rain. It’s free and it comes along even if you don’t do anything.

Which is all well and good, but if it ain’t raining, plants are dying. Relying on rain means putting your fate in the sky’s hands.

Same with organic traffic. You’re putting your business in Google’s hands.

But we can do some SEO. We can optimise our website, which is a bit like installing a big sky funnel over our garden. So we can think about Search Engine Optimisation as a way to collect more rain.

But that still only helps IF it rains.

Watering

What we need to keep our garden lush is a hose. That way we can turn the tap on when we need to give everything a good soaking.

If we need leads and sales, we need to turn on some of our hoses.

There are three main digital hoses:

• Email
• Social
• Ads

Email is a bit like connecting a hose to a water butt. You’ve collected email addresses, put them in the water butt, and you can encourage them to come to your site with an email every now and again.

But if you keep soaking the lawn with your water butt, you’ll run out of water. Same with your email list. You need to look after it. Use it too much and people unsubscribe or stop opening your messages.

Social media is like rigging up a hose to your neighbours tap. Old Mr Facebook might let you have some water for free, but it depends on what his algorithm feels like today.

But, Mr Facebook does know everyone. And he’ll put you in touch with the right people, for a price. So slip him a few quid for ads and he’ll turn on the tap.

Finally there’s digital advertising, which is like running a hose from your own tap. You know you’re on a meter, so every time you start watering it’s going to cost you.

However, it’s good quality stuff that you can turn on and off when you need it.

Planting

Everything’s watered, and you’ve got traffic coming to your site. Some of that traffic is converting into leads or sales. Most of it isn’t.

But watering isn’t the only thing we need to do in the garden. We need to weed it, cut shrubs back and replant our annuals. The more jazzy and blooming your garden is, the more work you need to do.

Which is why most businesses see crap results from their websites. Your competitor next door has been putting the hours in all Spring. He’s getting loads of lovely bees visit, his begonias are banging and his roses are a sight to behold. You’ve still got dead daffodils in the borders from March.

Like a garden, a website is always a work in progress.

We keep adding new plants every season to replace the old ones that look tired, or have gone over. And it should be the same with our site’s content.

The whole purpose of the internet is the sharing of information. And because of that, every algorithm on the web favours those who share their knowledge.

That means our content strategy is quite as important as a gardener’s planting strategy. Our gardener knows that their tulips will be gone before the summer and has already planned what plants will take their place.

A steady stream of new content is essential for attracting the leads and sales our website needs to be successful. How often you produce new stuff depends on your industry and audience, just as the amount of replanting you need to do depends on the plants in your garden.

Remember, your business has a finite number of potential customers. And there’s only so many of them that need your product now. And if they’ve already seen all your content, there’s no reason to come back if they haven’t already bought.

Trimming

But planting’s not the only bit of gardening we have to do. We also have to cut things back, trim them, or even move them, to get the best results.

We should be doing this all the time with our websites. You know what you want your site to achieve, so we need to make changes if it doesn’t.

If we want to sell more products, we should be changing and testing each stage on the buying process. If we want more leads, then we have to test different calls to action to learn what works best.

And trust me, that’s a constant process. Like the gardener who’s always tinkering with their flower beds, a website can always be improved.

Enjoying

But that’s not to say a website should be a financial black hole; sucking up. infinite amounts of money. Like your garden, the priority is being happy.

Yes, we may be able to squeeze out a few extra sales or leads if we change the font spacing very slightly. But that doesn’t mean we should.

Perfection is the enemy of good, and this is as true for our websites as it is for our gardens. When you’re happy with the leads and sales you’re getting from your website then it’s time to pull out the deckchair, sit back and enjoy the fruits of your hard work.

Well, at least until the lawn needs mowing again.

Need a digital gardener?