Running a nonprofit charity is not easy, one that focuses on helping people get fed is even harder.  We all need to do our part to help end hunger, nothing is sadder than thinking of someone in your community who is going hungry.  Thinking that “someone else will help” is never a good plan, so we have to support the outreach programs in your area.  We’ve proudly partnered with Feeding America for years and they have grown tremendously over the last decade.  But even with Feeding America, there’s thousands of local and regional shelters and food banks that help connect the supply chain with those in need.  Sadly, most don’t know what programs are in their community, it’s one of those out of sight out of mind problems.  If they are doing their jobs, no one notices.

These organizations are very busy, and often scrape to make ends meet, so generating awareness or even trying to raise donations locally becomes an afterthought.  Fundraising is a critical part for most of these organizations.  Endowments support some, which helps with this side of things, but for the rest of them they rely on the community to pitch in, and outside of Thanksgiving and Christmas it’s often forgotten.

One thing that I learned working with these organizations is that there are two distinct groups of homeless people, the chronic homeless and the situational or temporary homeless.  The second group makes the majority of homeless people, they look just like you or me, but due to a bizarre string of events, they ended up homeless for a period of time.  It can range from no family in the area or alive, losing a job suddenly then get into a car accident and next thing they know they are on the street with no time to prepare.  The scenarios are endless, these people just need a little help to get back on their feet.  Fate handed them a bad hand and they just need a few weeks or a few months to get back to a productive life.  This could be your cousin, your former roommate, a work colleague…bottom line, anyone can be down on their luck very suddenly.  The first group, the chronic homeless, this is who you see on the streets with signs week after week, the “face” of homeless.  These people generally have substance abuse problems, abuse throughout their life, and sadly often have mental health problems which cause a lot of their hardships.  These people need help too, but the short-term homeless are who your help will impact the most, they just need a little assistance to get back to a normal life.

One trick we’ve found that helps these foodbanks and soup kitchens get food to those in your community is a Google Grant.  What’s a Google Grant you ask?  It’s a program where Google will give free Google Paid Search credit to nonprofits.  In turn the nonprofit can use this to increase awareness of their charity to the community, generating more awareness, donations, volunteers, and supporting events.  Google Grants run through Google Ads and require a lot of consideration to maintain compliance you should consider an agency to help with your Google Grant Management we’ve found great agencies that charge as little as $399/month to manage and optimize the $10k/month in free paid search dollars.