Bit of an odd bit of news.
We’ve got a massive grant. We think. But every charity gets it. We think.
Let me start at the beginning.
We got this email:
This says that we are part of the Google Ad Grant. We had to jump through some hoops to get it, but it was relatively simple. I understood it would give us a few hundred pounds worth of ads to promote ourselves.
It turns out to be $10,000 worth of ads a month. A month.
We don’t know how to feel about this. On the one hand, $10,000 worth of ads and £2.70 will buy me a cup of hot chocolate – In my heart of hearts I don’t really believe that most advertising is effective, that we run the sort of projects that benefit from it, or even that we are a big enough organization to manage the process effectively. This grant won’t pay wages, help our end users or solve any sources of stress…
But… it is $10,000 a month. And maybe that’s advertising that helps us promote White Water Writers to schools, or Flowers for Turing to donors, maybe there really is value in raising our brand once it gets properly working. Maybe this is the start of a real opportunity to scale up the organization – more income, more staff, more projects. Maybe it will be worth it on the ego level – a few more blogs written about us, the odd newspaper article.
Right now I don’t know. A lot of me is excited about the opportunity, a small part of me resents there being yet another thing to learn about and manage. We’ll know soon enough. I’ve set up some test adds. The response hasn’t been overwhelming. So far I’ve had exactly one click:
…and got all my adverts banned because they appeared to be advertising a gambling site…
So, you know, I’ve probably got a long way to go…