Not-for-profits (NFPs) need a reliable pipeline of funding, volunteers and partners to effectively support their communities.
That requires effective marketing.
Below are three marketing initiatives from Google, Canva, and HubSpot that are exclusively available to NFPs. You can use these to materially lower your cost per donation, lift brand awareness, and reduce admin time.
Google Ad Grants
With Google Ad Grants, your NFP can access up to $10,000 USD per month in in-kind Google Search advertising. Treated like a media line item, that’s $120,000 USD per year in budget you don’t have to raise.
Why you should care:
- You can get your cause in front of people actively searching terms like “donate to…” and “volunteer with…”.
- It’s an incredibly efficient use of non-cash resources to drive real cash outcomes.
Predictable, year-round reach that smooths out peaks and troughs in campaign calendars.
However, the grant has guardrails. Recipients must maintain a 5%+ CTR, use relevant keywords, and follow best-practice account hygiene. If you don’t maintain this, your monthly allocation shrinks (or is suspended), leaving donations and volunteer sign-ups on the table.
We’ve worked with an organisation receiving less than $150 per month in value simply because the account wasn’t optimised. With disciplined management, we’ve grown that to over $3,500 per month, a +20x swing in free media spend.
The takeaway:
Treat the Google Grant like any paid media budget: target intent, control waste, and report on key outcomes like cost per donation and cost per volunteer application.
Free Canva Pro
Eligible NFPs can access free Canva Pro licences with enterprise-grade creative tools, templates and brand controls at zero software cost. This includes Canva’s brand kit functionality, which makes it easy for your team to produce consistent branded content.
Why you should care:
- Reduce reliance on ad-hoc design spend for assets like social posts, flyers and display ads.
- Remove bottlenecks by creating high-quality visual assets in-house.
Lock brand colours, fonts and templates so everything your team (and volunteers) produces looks on-brand and professional.
Without a structured brand kit, the asset creation process is time-consuming and produces unreliable outputs. That inconsistency often erodes trust with donors and corporate partners.
The takeaway:
Use Canva’s brand toolkit to standardise assets once and then scale them as needed. This will buy you back time and money while also protecting brand reputation.
Discounted HubSpot
Through its Nonprofits program, HubSpot offers eligible NFPs a 40% discount on its premium CRM and marketing tools, along with nonprofit-friendly onboarding and over 1,000 integrations.
Why you should care:
- Track every supporter from first touch to recurring donor in a single system. No more spreadsheet sprawl or “who owns this relationship?” confusion.
- Automated processes, like event follow-ups and lapsed-donor win-backs, reduce manual effort and help with governance and audit trails.
- Understand which channels actually drive donations and grants so you can shift budget with confidence.
Fragmented data across disconnected spreadsheets means higher acquisition costs, duplicated outreach, and missed grant deadlines. It also creates reputational risk when supporters receive off-brand or mistimed communications. With HubSpot in your tech stack, these problems disappear, freeing you up to reliably attract, engage and convert new donors and volunteers.
The takeaway:
A modern, properly onboarded CRM pays for itself by reducing leakage in your funnel and enabling smarter, automated stewardship at scale.
Maximise impact, minimise overhead
All of these initiatives are designed to help NFPs save time and money while increasing their positive impact.
If you want to translate the value of these free and discounted tools into measurable revenue growth and operational savings, we’re here to help.
Talk to our team about getting the most out of these NFP initiatives.
