Note: The transcription has been edited for clarity.

Host: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Go Beyond Fundraising podcast. Today, we are thrilled to discuss digital advertising, a topic that is becoming increasingly crucial in our digital age.

There are many misconceptions about digital advertising that can prevent nonprofits from leveraging their full potential. To help us debunk some of these myths, I am thrilled to be joined by my colleague, Laura Hinrichsen. Laura, welcome to the show.

Laura Hinrichsen: Thanks, Leah. I’m really excited to be here.

Host: So, you are our leading subject matter expert on digital advertising, and you have so much knowledge about the topic that I can’t wait to share with our audience. Before we get into these five myths, I’d love to know just a little bit more about your experience with digital advertising and the team that you lead here at Allegiance Group + Pursuant so that we can get an idea of what your day-to-day looks like and how you encounter some of these myths out in the wild.

Laura Hinrichsen: Sure. So, I am the VP of Advertising at Allegiance Group + Pursuant. When the two companies merged last year, I was part of the legacy Allegiance team and was really excited to get to work with our counterparts on the legacy Pursuant side. So, I know historically that team had not really had a full, robust, in-house digital advertising team, and that was something a lot of folks are really excited about with the merger bringing together.

That had existed on the legacy Allegiance for the past several years. We have a really robust in-house advertising team of eight. We are in-house, so we’re not outsourcing. For nonprofits, that’s huge because all your advertising budgets are actually going toward advertising. You know, there’s no markup. There’s no commission. So, I think that this new capability is really a benefit.

You know, the fact that our team is in-house means we can collaborate with folks on the email team, the web dev team, the design team, and the direct mail team to make sure we can really bring that bulk model experience to life and leverage insights from one channel to another. That will play into some of the myths that we debunk in just a few minutes, but I think having a really skilled in-house advertising team has also been a huge benefit to many of our nonprofit clients.

Host: Let’s get into these myths. So, Laura, you and I cooked up this idea of some of these common misconceptions that nonprofits have around digital advertising while we were, I think, sitting around a table with some of our other colleagues. So, the first myth that we wanted to talk about today is, “Google grant money should be invested in fundraising ads.” Laura, why is this a myth?

Laura Hinrichsen: That is one of the myths that is very commonly brought up when we’re onboarding new clients. Many nonprofits have the wonderful benefit of a Google grant. Microsoft also has grants now. So, what I’m saying to this one can also apply to the other. Some clients still have the legacy Google grant that’s about $10,000 a month. There are a few that still have the Grants Pro, which is sometimes four to five times that amount, but there’s a big misperception that the Google grant can cover all your Google Ads needs and all your fundraising needs.

For the past several years, on the legacy Allegiance side and definitely at the combined agency, we have seen that not to be the case. And it was refreshing to see that in the M+R benchmark that came out a little over a year ago. I think for the first time, they started talking about the grant, and we saw a lot of additional proof beyond our own data that it’s not quite the right way to look at that.

One of the reasons why Google Ad Grant isn’t as good for a fundraising mechanism as it is for something like awareness is that the inventory that Google provides to the grant program is not bad, but I would consider it remnant inventory. Much of the digital advertising ecosystem functions on an auction and competitive bid basis. So, just by the nature of how it is set up, a Google grant will almost never outperform a paid Google Ad. It’s simply not how the inventory and the bidding model are structured and prioritized.

Can you raise some money on Google Grants? You can, but it’s not the cost per dollar raised or the return ad spend metric, whichever way you prefer to look at that information. It will not be as efficient for fundraising in the grant as it is versus paid.

So, to put an easier-to-discuss focus on this, what is the Google grant good for? So, the Google grant is perfect for awareness. It’s perfect for folks who want to learn more about your organization. That could include folks who are looking for volunteer opportunities. It could include folks who, in the instance of Food banks — we have a lot of Food banks clients for whom we are really successfully managing their Google grant. So, it could be folks looking to donate food or find out how they can support the food bank.

The grant could also be really helpful in making sure you’re present for those folks who need your organization’s services. Whether that’s a food bank or something that provides veteran services, being present to reach the folks who need the services your organization can provide is a tremendous benefit. What we have found to be incredibly successful for our clients is that the grant efforts are reserved for all those elements I mentioned. So, it’s awareness of your programs and what the organization can do.

We like to reserve any paid Google effort for the most competitive fundraising terms. So, some of your branded terms or the terms that you’re using for prospecting and fundraising, whether it’s end-of-year or just during your tentpole campaigns. That is really the best way to divide and conquer those efforts.

The grant can also be a bit of a testing ground, like if you want to drive traffic to new content on your site. Start to think about what people are out there searching for and which content you just put on your site could be an answer. That’s a great way to get your website traffic up — organic and paid work together and benefit each other.

In summary, the Google Grant should be leveraged to help drive awareness for your organization and the services it provides. Your paid Google or Microsoft efforts should be leveraged toward competitive terms for fundraising.

Host: Let’s move on to the second myth, which I was really interested in talking a little bit more about, which is this notion that Facebook advertising is dead or isn’t really effective anymore.

Laura Hinrichsen: Yeah. This has been a debate for the last several years. It first picked up a lot of steam a few years ago when Apple started releasing many of its newest iOS updates. I think it was starting with iOS 14, 15, 16, all of those. Advertising on Facebook has become more challenging, but the nonprofit community has it easier in many ways than some other categories. So, again, there is a lot of change, but it still needs to be done.

There have been some challenges with Facebook targeting. So, if you’ve ever done a Facebook or Instagram ad campaign, many of us will remember the days when you could very easily search for and target followers of specific pages or things like that. Or a lot of really specific information relating to certain demographic characteristics like education and income, some ethnic things, some related to religious beliefs, and even things including sexual orientation.

A lot of those criteria are no longer available for targeting on Facebook. That’s simply because some bad actors out there wanted to target folks in a discriminatory fashion or use that data inappropriately. So that’s sort of ruined it for everybody. But there are a lot of tools at our disposal, especially in the nonprofit community, where we can counteract that in a huge way.

First-party data is our biggest tool and our arsenal to help overcome some of those targeting challenges. Nonprofits have a wealth of constituent data. So, whether that’s folks who subscribe to newsletters, have engaged in advocacy actions, or have donated, we have a lot of great information. In a very safe, privacy-compliant way, those data points and those files can be loaded into the Facebook ads platform to allow you to target some folks directly.

You can also create a lookalike model of folks who act like — and by act, I mean, whose online behavior is similar to — the people on the file you uploaded. And that is a really impactful mechanism for targeting because you know the people in your file. They’ve donated or committed some action. What better-targeting input than to say, “Go find me more people exactly like the person”? That is one of the biggest tools we have to help overcome those targeting challenges.

Of course, there’s been a lot of talk about the demise of the cookie. Google just delayed that yet again until, I think, the end of 2025, but Facebook has actually been sort of working ahead to counter that for quite some time. There are tools, a conversions API, and some additional tools that, at the current time, you still can very much measure what’s happening in there. You can create custom conversions pretty easily.

So, there are also other data partners. You know, there are several that we work with where you can purchase other data segments. So, for example, we have clients that might want to target folks that lean in a particular direction on things like climate change, human rights, religious affiliation, and what have you. There are still some data providers from which you can purchase this data and feed it into advertising platforms, as I just mentioned with Meta. You can upload that, as I mentioned you could, with your first-party data.

Especially when we have a lot of clients who, as part of their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, want to make sure the folks in those groups know about their services. Being able to target folks by some of those criteria and doing so for the right reasons is really important to some of our clients, so this helps us do that.

There are also a lot of other tactical opportunities and tools within the Meta platform that can benefit a lot of nonprofits. One is that there is a lot of flexibility in the platform to edit ad materials, use a little bit of AI to help you with some copywriting, and provide variations or automatic optimization to the imagery you upload. There are even opportunities for you to edit video content.

So, if you’re willing and have someone who can do the work, there are a lot of opportunities within Meta where you can edit materials, refine things a little bit, test, and learn. So, in summary, it’s more challenging than it used to be, but it is not dead by any means. And we’re all going to see that much, much more as the election advertising gets even more intense in the coming months.

Host: I love that you brought up video editing tools and even AI tools on the Meta platforms. I definitely want to come back to that when we talk about video on our last myth.

Also, as of recording, I just noticed this past weekend that Meta had just rolled out AI summaries for certain things. And so, it’s really interesting now when you click on a post, and you see comments on it; it is now summarizing the comments for you so that if you don’t want to read through all the comments on something, you don’t have to. And that’s not specific to advertising. It’s more just to organic posts. But it’s really, really interesting right now how much they’re innovating in the platform.

Laura Hinrichsen: Absolutely.

Host: Alright. Moving on to myth number three, this one is really relevant for many nonprofit marketers, which is that last-click attribution is sufficient as opposed to other ways of tracking the efficacy of your ads.

Laura Hinrichsen: Sure. This is a super common one, and I don’t think a day or a week goes by without me discussing it with some clients. There are many ways to look at attribution; there’s not just one best way.

I would say that last-click attribution is the most common. In case someone listening isn’t familiar with it, last-click attribution is about giving credit only to someone who has seen an ad, clicked on it, and then converted. Last-click attribution would not take into account someone who, let’s say, was exposed to an ad on Facebook and didn’t click immediately, but you planted a seed, and it came back and donated to your site later on. If you looked at last-click attribution, that donation would not be counted.

So, a lot of client dashboards, tools, and some of those extra ad management tools that some of our clients purchase, some don’t, and some of those tend to favor last-click attribution. What we try to get clients to do is to look at the big picture. We want to look at the full advertising funnel, especially if you have a client or an organization that has an awareness goal. If you are only looking at last-click attribution, that model doesn’t take into account all those activities further up the funnel, like awareness ads or even lead-gen ads. It’s not considering all the additional touchpoints along the donor journey that got someone to that final point.

Some certain platforms or channels will be more negatively impacted by a last-click-only model. For example, in the last fiscal year or so, many of our client categories, particularly the food bank category, have invested more in programmatic display and programmatic video. That is an upper- to mid-funnel tactic. In that type of tactic, specifically, the majority of conversions are going to be view-through conversions. So, it’s the opposite of what I meant before.

So, this is someone who has been exposed to an ad on one channel or multiple channels. They eventually convert, but it’s not at the first ad they see. So again, a good example is when someone sees a video; they see a programmatic display ad, they’re intrigued, and later on, they’re like, “Oh, shoot. I meant to donate when I was busy, so I’m going to go and search for that organization’s name again, and I’m going to go find their website and donate that way.” And in an instance like that, that donation would probably get if you’re looking at the last click to either organic search or paid search, depending on what they clicked on. But it’s really important to find a way to account for the impact that all your other touchpoints made.

We know that the donor journey is very complex for every type of organization and every type of donor. We encourage clients to try to look at a model or consider data points that factor in conversions of all kinds — again, those last clicks that occur immediately or may occur a little bit later, but as a result of campaign exposure across many tactics. It’s definitely a subject of much debate across many clients.

Host: Absolutely. I imagine that it is also something that is probably a well-discussed point in eCommerce marketing. I see so many ads on Instagram for different beauty products, gadgets, tools, whatever that platform thinks I might be interested in. I might scroll through that ad on the platform, but the buying experience in Meta is not always optimal. So, a lot of times, if I see something that I think looks really interesting to me, I’ll often go and type that website into the browser on my phone or my laptop and then search for the item that I saw on that ad because it’s just going to be a better experience to go through that transaction in that way.

Laura Hinrichsen: Yep. Most of the ad platforms we work in for clients can easily break out the conversions for what is viewed through and what is clicked through. So, it is also very common for a lot of organizations to prioritize last click, And that’s okay. So, there are sometimes different levers that we can pull to try to favor certain tactics, certain creative, what have you, and certain targeting elements that are more effective in getting that last click.

Host: So, myth number four. Let’s go right into it: “Digital advertising should only be used for fundraising.”

Laura Hinrichsen: This is one of my favorite myths and one of the easiest to help overcome. It is very natural because of the immediacy and the engaging content that can be put out very quickly with advertising. It is natural to want to go right to that donation ask, but clients across categories and geographies often come to us and say, “But people don’t quite know who we are, or they don’t know exactly what our organization does.”

We see organizations with awareness challenges time and time again. I talked earlier about the importance of a file and a list and how we can leverage that first-party data. Maybe an organization isn’t as rich in that data quite yet. If you try to go out and ask for a donation immediately, your conversion rates will be lower. Your average donation amounts and return ad spend — all those important metrics — will be much lower.

So, we see across many clients and categories that when you invest in other areas of the funnel to establish that awareness, use advertising along with other channels like email, things on your website, and what have you. When we can use some of those digital tactics to make folks aware of your organization and what you do and then nurture them, we see that pay off on the back end. So, people aren’t going to donate if they don’t know who your organization is, they don’t know what you’re doing, or they don’t know where the money is going.

So, when we see organizations sort of attack the full funnel and make sure that we have some presence in an awareness mindset or something with lead gen where we can get folks that maybe have been exposed and might be aware of us a little bit, but maybe a lower hurdle is to get them to give us their email address so they can receive a newsletter and learn a little bit more so they can decide to donate.

A lot of our clients do some really amazing advocacy work. Getting someone to complete an advocacy action or a form is the better way for them to start that relationship with your organization formally. Those things that involve getting new names and getting folks to engage are all things we can touch through advertising.

And even within a particular channel, like, you know, we talked about Facebook earlier. There are elements even within one ad platform, and we can attack the entire funnel. So, for example, we could have a running video ad that generates some awareness a little bit more: who is this organization? What we can then do, you know, using pixel data, using data right within platforms and say, “I want to reach people who have seen this ad or have engaged with this particular video, and maybe people that also follow my page and engage with it organically.” We can then target some of those we know of because they’ve done some action but haven’t offered their information yet. So, we might want to target them with other asks, such as signing up for a newsletter or submitting some information.

And then, further down the funnel, when we really want to encourage them to donate, we can use all those same targeting tactics to further target a much more refined and qualified group of individuals with that donation app. And when we see clients attacking the full funnel, we see a lot of success in terms of donor retention, which tends to be much stronger once we get those particular folks in. When we look a lot of times year over year, we see their percentage of new donors. And what organization does not want newer younger donors right now? They all do, right? So, we see that kind of full-funnel approach increase key metrics like new donors, average donation, return ad spend, and all those good metrics. We see that increase quite a bit.

I mentioned lead gen a little bit in the context of Meta. There are still some really great pay-to-play partners who specialize in lead gen and name acquisition and have the opportunity to get your message out there on a platform and in a mindset where folks are going to fight to act upon the causes and topics that mean a lot to them. There are also many other ways to get new names through an advertising mechanism.

That helps us with future advertising campaigns, but it also helps us add folks to direct mail files and email lists. So, this is a huge opportunity for us to address all aspects of the funnel through digital advertising. And that might sound expensive. It’s really not. In many instances, we can make that work for just about any client.

It’s a discussion we love to have. I think clients are very pleasantly surprised that they can do so much more, and then they’re equally as excited and surprised when they see the results on the back end.

Host: Absolutely. Without going into too much into the weeds, I’ve seen some amazing stats from some of the work that your team has done where, by strategically investing the right percentage of your budget in ads at each stage of the funnel, you can create an amazing and holistic journey from awareness to that conversion by just placing your bets with your ad dollars in the right places and in the right amounts. And you can do that with just about any budget as long as you know how much to invest at each stage of the journey.

Laura Hinrichsen: What’s also really great is that because we are in-house and on the platform, we’re looking at that data. In some clients that, you know, might have a bit more of a robust budget, we might have five or six tactics or placements happening at a time that is in that sort of upper funnel awareness goal. Suppose we see one or two of those tactics performing exponentially better than the other, even within an overall objective or within a channel. In that case, we can pull many different levers and increase spend and performance on things that are, once live, performing at a stronger rate.

There’s just that inherent flexibility within digital advertising as well, where we can move things across objectives, across partners, you know, based on real-time data.

Host: Alright. Let’s move on to our last myth: “Video content is hard or expensive to make.”

Laura Hinrichsen: Sure. So, this is another one that is very pleasantly surprising to many clients. So, I’ll start by explaining why video is so important. Video can be critical in communicating the emotions related to the organization’s mission. So, on an emotionally influential level, video is really important. On a practical level, picking on our friend Facebook again, their algorithms prioritize video-based content, and you’ll see that across the board on other social platforms as well.

We always talk to a lot of our clients about how when we can get video, we definitely want to use it. Video can work really well in the upper funnel. It can work really well in the lower funnel, too. But there’s sometimes some initial pushback because folks think, “Oh my goodness, I have to go out and do a big expensive video shoot or shoot something brand new for just this ad, just this one campaign.” It would be amazing if you could, but that’s not required.

So, how have we successfully gotten around that for our clients? Number one, if there is organic video content that they’ve used on their social platforms, we can often edit it. You know, we have some really talented editors in-house who can do that type of thing. There are also some tools that organizations can use that are pretty darn cost-efficient to make edits and get something a little shorter for an ad-type format.

In Meta, for example, there are also edits and reductions that you can make to a video right within the ad platform. So, there’s a lot of opportunity to rework something that might have been created for another purpose.

We also have a lot of clients, particularly some of those in the health space, perhaps, where a patient’s story is impactful, and we’ve seen some success with candid videos, something just kind of created on someone’s mobile phone telling their personal story. That can be impactful. We’ve also had incredible success with our very talented designers taking existing clients’ static images of the folks you serve or something that represents a program you have. We can take static imagery and make it into animated GIFs. And that will, in a platform like Meta, satisfy that video file type requirement that helps us get in good favor with the algorithm.

So, there are a lot of things that we can do to repurpose video that you have, take static assets that you have, and kind of make them into a video that still communicates emotion, still communicates the importance of giving. So, there’s really been a lot of opportunity there, I think, much more than a lot of clients would think. And something that’s definitely feasible across a lot of budget levels.

Host: 100%. I’ve been impressed with how, specifically on the Meta platform and Instagram, in particular, they have so many recommendations built into the video editor. The other day, I was making a video, and I got a little tip that popped up: it was longer than 60 seconds. Currently, the algorithm on Instagram shows that videos that are about 60 seconds or shorter tend to perform the best. So, it gave me a little recommendation to be briefer.

But that’s always changing. And there are amazing channels that you can follow. There is an Instagram Reels account where they always put out new recommendations for how videos perform. And so, as a personal organic video creator, I’ve been so impressed about how much education there is to be had just for the average person. And, definitely, for a nonprofit with a small budget. There’s a lot you can do with little investment.

Laura Hinrichsen: Absolutely. I cannot agree more.

Host: Alright, Laura. Thank you so much for joining us today to go over these myths. Is there anything else you’d like to share before we wrap up this conversation?

Laura Hinrichsen: I think we’ve covered all the most important myths. You know, we love brainstorming with clients. We love asking questions. I think as fast as the field of digital advertising is evolving and changing — literally sometimes on a daily basis — just because you tried something a few years ago and it didn’t work or something that was true a couple of years ago might now actually be a misperception because things and capabilities have advanced.

So, I would encourage all organizations to be open to trying something new, and it never hurts to have a conversation about it.

Host: Well, Laura, thanks again for joining us today. I’m excited that we finally got to sit down and record this conversation, and I hope we do it again soon.