Scaling Google Grants for Animal Charities

We mentioned in an earlier blog post that we thought there was room to expand in online advertising for animal charities. This blog post attempts to explain a way to scale up online Google Grants for animal charities.

The first grant that Effective Fundraising received was a Google Grant. Google Grants are a special sort of grant that Google offers that are available to most registered charities. What is unique about a Google Grant is that they are relatively easy to get, but instead of money going into the charity, you instead get $120,000 per year in free Google Ad Words advertising. This can be used in a couple of ways. The first is so the charity can promote itself by getting more search traffic and donations. However an even more effective use of Google Grant money is in the case where the charity’s goal is specifically to get out a message, since the ads can link directly to the intervention the charity would spend money on otherwise.

The best application of this is in animal charities such as The Humane League which show the most high impact videos online to promote vegetarianism. This means 100% of Google Grant money is going to the intervention, and the charity is merely a stepping stone. One project Effective Fundraising is considering taking up as a result of this is trying to quickly acquire Google Grants for many other animal charities, since they can also link directly to the same high impact videos, meaning the Google Grant money going to them would be just as effective as going to The Humane League.

If you are working with or volunteering for a registered animal rights charity and would like to work on this project with Effective Fundraising please see below.


Conditions of Free Program

Charities interested in applying for this service need to fit the following criteria. If accepted the full process of acquiring and managing the grant will be completely free of charge. 

1. Must be a registered charity. The charity can be based in any country.
   
2. Must be either a charity that promotes meat reduction, vegetarianism, or veganism.
   
3. Must be committed to using the scientific method to choose the content advertised. This means either:
   
1. Using What Came Before, the video that has evidence behind it being the most effective at getting people to change their diet. OR,
   
2. Doing A-B testing between What Came Before and the content of your choice. The test will compare how many people order veg starter kits as a rough proxy for how many people change their diet. The content that gets the most veg starter kits ordered per dollar will be used. This then contributes to the growing knowledge about what works in the animal welfare movement.