Every rupee, accounted for.
Donor money carries a different obligation than marketing budget. The work still has to be good, and most non profit marketing fails on execution quality rather than on intent or on budget.
What we charge for and what we do not.
At cost means we bill what the work costs us to deliver and nothing above it, with the working shown. Which column something falls in is agreed before it starts, not after.
Ten thousand dollars a month, mostly unspent.
Google gives eligible non profits ten thousand US dollars of monthly search advertising. Most grant accounts spend a fraction of it, and a meaningful number get suspended, because the programme has requirements that look administrative and behave as operational constraints.
The five percent click through floor
Accounts that fall below a five percent click through rate for two consecutive months face deactivation. That threshold is high for search advertising and it rules out the broad keyword strategy most agencies default to. The accounts that survive run tight intent matched campaigns rather than wide reach.
Conversion tracking is mandatory
Grant accounts require at least one meaningful conversion per month, tracked properly. A donation is the obvious one. Volunteer signups, resource downloads and newsletter subscriptions all qualify and are easier to generate consistently.
Structural requirements
Minimum campaign and ad group counts, sitelink extensions, geographic targeting and a functioning website with a secure connection. Suspensions are usually caused by one of these lapsing rather than by anything strategic.
The bid ceiling and how to work past it
Grant accounts carry a bid cap that puts them below paid advertisers in most auctions. Smart bidding strategies are exempt from that cap, which is the single most useful thing to know about the programme and the thing most under used.
We run Ad Grants management free of charge, permanently. It is a fixed amount of Google's money and there is no honest reason to take a percentage of it.
The constraint is rarely the campaign.
Non profits get pitched campaigns constantly. The campaign is almost never what is limiting donations. What limits donations is that the giving flow takes six steps on a phone, asks for a PAN before it asks for a rupee, defaults to a one time gift rather than a recurring one, and loses a third of people at a payment page that was built in 2019.
Mobile first, genuinely
Most Indian donation traffic is mobile and most donation flows are desktop forms compressed. Step count and field count are the two numbers that move completion rate, and both are usually double what they need to be.
Recurring as the default
A monthly donor is worth several times a one time donor and the difference is often just which option is pre selected. UPI autopay makes small recurring gifts practical in India in a way card mandates never did.
Tax receipting that works immediately
80G receipting handled automatically at the point of donation rather than manually at year end. It removes a support burden and it materially improves repeat giving.
Proof at the moment of decision
What a specific amount actually does, stated at the point where the amount is chosen rather than in a report published nine months later.
Written for a donor, not for a compliance file.
Annual reports and impact documents are the most read things a non profit publishes and are usually produced by whoever had capacity in the fourth quarter. They go to institutional funders, CSR committees, individual donors and prospective board members, each of whom needs something different from the same document.
The version that works separates the numbers a funder needs to verify from the story a donor needs to feel, and puts both in one artifact without either damaging the other. That is a writing and design problem rather than a data problem, and the data is usually already there.
Small teams, the most to gain.
A three person communications team at a non profit carries the same workload as a fifteen person team at a company with revenue. This is where AI deployment has the clearest case and the least access to anyone who can implement it responsibly.
Grant and proposal drafting
First drafts against your own past submissions and evidence base, with a human writing the parts that carry commitment.
Donor communication at scale
Segment specific updates produced from one set of programme facts rather than one message sent to everybody.
Field data to narrative
Programme reporting turned into publishable material without a three week lag and without inventing anything that was not measured.
Translation
Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and English, reviewed by a human before anything reaches a beneficiary or a donor.