We are very pleased to announce that our club has been accepted into the Google Ad Grants scheme, which is only available to charities which meet certain eligibility criteria. This means that Google will gift our club up to US$10k per month (approximately NZ$15k) in "in-kind" online advertising through the Google AdWords platform.
You may have noticed when searching online using Google that the first set of search results have a little "Ad" box next to them. These are ads that have been delivered via Google AdWords. This is called 'Pay Per Click' advertising because the advertiser is normally charged when the ad is clicked on. In our case, the ads will be free (up to our maximum ad spend allowance).
Why would we want to do this? Well, at the moment, most of the visitors to our website find us because they are specifically looking for us, or have heard about one of our events and Googled it. This allows us to run ads continuously to capture people who aren't looking for us.
For example, we can run ads that appear to people searching for 'volunteering in Howick'. We could run ads to promote our events to people searching for 'What's on in Auckland this weekend' or 'What's on Auckland'. We could run ads to promote the Christmas Lights to people searching for 'Christmas lights displays Auckland'....you get the idea.
We've already started the process and have written a bunch of ads that focus on recruitment, fundraising (i.e. initially our school chip cooking service), and programmes (initially the Peace Poster and Young Speechmaker contests). These ads began running on Wednesday evening.
This has been a team effort. If our website did not have a substantial amount of content we wouldn't have been eligible. The fact that our monthly newsletter The Tatler is a rich source of articles which can be shared on the website, and the club having approved a new website in the first place, has made this possible.
In time, we will ad more ads related to our events and our other programmes as they come round again.