This project started as a small test, and let’s say it went well. REALLY well. We wanted to see if a nonprofit that supports people with disabilities can increase its bottom-line gross profits by selling POD (print on demand) products compared to asking for donations. And just to make things a bit more challenging, we could only test using the Google Ad Grants budget, as the nonprofit had no additional test budget we could use.
The hypothesis was that it would be easier to sell than to ask for donations. And once the contributors are in a “purchasing mode”, they’ll be more likely to donate on top of their purchase.
Instead of asking users to donate, we offered them something to buy.
TL;DR The Results
By switching from direct donations to merchandise based quid pro quo contributions, the nonprofit increased its bottom line by roughly 50 percent.
About a third of buyers added a voluntary donation at checkout.
Almost a third of those became recurring monthly donors.
Brand searches increased by around 50 percent.
All of this came from the same Google Ad Grant traffic.
About the Client
The client is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that assists individuals with disabilities in securing stable employment and achieving independent living.
Before this project, most of their income came from direct user donations driven by Google Ad Grants traffic.
This worked well, pretty much as well as it can be while relying solely on the Ad Grants budget, but it stopped growing, and we wanted to see how far we could take this.
The Challenge
Donations were stable but had clearly plateaued. Traffic was not the problem because we used similar techniques as we used here to really maximize the spending capabilities of their Google Ad Grants account.
We needed to increase the bottom-line contribution value without adding budget, and unlike donations, selling a shirt has actual real costwe needed to cover.
So, if a donor donates a $100, the nonprofit get a sum that is fairly close to a $100, but if we sell $100 worth of merch, we have underlying costs of at least $35, meaning we needed a higher revenue just to match what we earned from donation.
The Hypothesis
The idea was straightforward. It is easier to sell a 25 dollar T shirt than to convince a user to donate 10 dollars.
Once a user decides to buy something, it is easier to ask for a small extra donation at checkout.
Search volume for disability themed shirts is also much higher than search volume for donation-focused keywords, and it’s a lot less competitive.
This made it a natural test for a Google Ad Grant account.
The Plan
The nonprofit already had an online shop that was not in use. It had some products but nothing really worked there.
We updated it, created a new section for the shirts, categorized them, and added an option to include a one time or monthly donation during checkout.
Search and Search Pmax campaigns only.
We tracked everything with UTMs so we could measure sales, donations, and recurring donations separately.
Execution
We launched a separate merchandise campaign inside the Grant account. Keywords focused on phrases like funny disability shirts, invisible disability shirts, and disability awareness shirts. None had a particularly high search volume, but compensated for it by being hyper relevany in the ads copy.
Each keyword group sent users to a relevant product page or category. Tracking allowed us to see exactly how much each user contributed, including follow-up donations added during checkout.
We assumed that monthly donations would have around the same length, about 9 months.
Results
Merchandise buyers contributed about 1.3 times more per user than traditional donors.
When including recurring donations added at checkout, the total contribution reached roughly 1.5 times the baseline.
Serious designs attracted more recurring donors, yet, funny designs converted more buyers. Both contributed meaningfully to overall performance.
Brand searches also increased by about 50 percent, indicating higher engagement and interest.
What We Learned
Selling something that resonates with our user base and their families & friends is often easier than asking for a donation. A shirt gives supporters a way to express their identity and their connection to the cause.
For many users, this made the decision to support significantly easier.
Funny shirts brought higher volume. Serious shirts brought more long-term commitment.
Both contributed to the bottom line pretty qeualy.
The Aftermath
The nonprofit decided to continue selling merchandise. We are now preparing a second Google Ads account for remarketing, YouTube, and Display campaigns and social ads will follow.
We also plan to print a small QR code on the shirts that leads directly to a donation page, allowing non-buyers to contribute as well.
This project showed that increasing contribution does not always require more budget. Sometimes the easiest win is simply changing what you ask for.
