One of the biggest challenges faced by non-profit organizations today is recruiting quality volunteers. This post will teach you how to use your Google Grant to successfully advertise directly to potential volunteers while they are searching for a place to donate their time.

Google Grants have many uses. They are great for promoting programs, services, events, and fundraising, but the one piece that is often overlooked is volunteer recruitment.

Your potential volunteers use Google like everyone else. They type in what they are looking for, in this case, places to volunteer, and view the results. This is where a Google Grant can help.

If your organization does not have a Google Grant click here.

How to Set Up A Successful Volunteer Recruitment Campaign

Campaign Level

Start a new campaign. I prefer to be straight forward when naming campaigns, so I would call it “Volunteer Recruitment.” This way it is easy to find and monitor your results in your account. Another benefit of having a separate campaign is that you can easily put the campaign on pause when you are not actively advertising for volunteers.

Set the campaign to run only in the appropriate geographic areas. You don’t need people across the country applying to volunteer if you are only looking locally.

Ad Groups

People typically search for volunteer positions in two ways. One, they search for volunteer opportunities by location and then read through the results to see what is out there. And the other way they search is by the type of volunteer work they want to do.

Set up two adgroups, one serving each kind of search. While your text ads may end up being similar, it is easier to keep track of your ads if you organize your adgroups this way.

Keywords

There are two approaches that you should take here:

1) Be broad – catch all potential volunteers who are looking generally, by using keywords such as:

Volunteer Toronto

Where to volunteer in Toronto

Best places to volunteer in Toronto

2) Be specific – so people looking to volunteer with organizations like yours find what they are looking for:

Volunteer with the elderly

I want to help elderly people

I want to volunteer with the elderly

Experiment with both types of keywords and measure what brings the best results for your organization.

Landing Page

Now that you have brought users to your website, it is important to have a dedicated page for volunteer recruitment.

This page should have a description of any available volunteer positions, information about your organization, and clear contact information so that potential volunteers can get in touch with you.

Use visuals on this page. A photo of your current volunteers in action is ideal. Adding a story about how your volunteers positively impact your community will help convert people from being potential volunteers to people asking how they can become involved.

For more information on how the Google Grants program can benefit your organization contact us.