Nonprofit Helping Korean Orphans

[AmazingLarry]

Hey guys, so my wife and I started a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and we've been exploring different avenues for fundraising throughout the year. As part of this, I made a website for the organization, and we've been running Google Ads through their grant program for the past few months. There is still some optimization I need to do within Google Ads, but so far the CTR and targeting have been pretty good.

Our organization hosts a 10-day language & culture exchange program in the United States for a group of high school students who live at an orphanage in South Korea. The main objectives are to expose them to education & career opportunities and help with their English learning, which are both areas that they miss out on greatly due to being orphans.

Based on this, I have a few ad groups based on different aspects of the organization. These being Korean charities, children's home charities and education charities. The CTR on the Korean ad group is 13% which makes sense because this is a much more niche characteristic of the organization vs children's home and charity, and someone searching for Korean charity is more likely to be interested in a very small organization like ours. The CTR for the other two groups are both around 6%.

We're getting plenty of people to the site through the ads and we've had one donation so far as a result. This is awesome, but the conversion rate is not good and we would obviously like to improve on this. I know there are differences between running a nonprofit and for-profit business, but I believe many of the same principles still apply as far as providing value, even if it's in a different way.

If anyone is interested in taking a look at the website and offering some suggestions for improvements, that would amazing.

Here is the link to our site: The Kkachi Foundation Inc.


One of the main improvements I know I need to make is adding relevant pictures and video. I know telling a good story is important for something like this and encouraging people to donate. This is our first year running the program, so right now we only have pictures from when we volunteered at the orphanage a couple years ago.

The first program is taking place at the end of this month, so I'm planning to do an update afterwards with nice pictures & video of the students doing different activities.

I also want to get some feedback from the students and staff at the orphanage so I can put some quotes on the website about how it affected them and helped them, or how changed their outlook.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

 

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[Two Dog]

We're getting plenty of people to the site through the ads and we've had one donation so far as a result. This is awesome, but the conversion rate is not good and we would obviously like to improve on this. I know there are differences between running a nonprofit and for-profit business, but I believe many of the same principles still apply as far as providing value, even if it's in a different way.

At its core, fundraising is fundamentally about telling a story and asking strangers to help write the next chapter. The marketing strategies are almost exactly the same for non-profit and for-profit to my mind, but short shareable videos that tell a compelling story are the big lever for fundraising.

I started working recently with a local animal rescue group to assist with their fund raising. Pretty standard non-profit website, pictures, etc. basically begging for $$$. Although they've been around for 10+ years, they really haven't put any thought into the marketing basics: audience, donor profile, 80/20 breakdown, messaging and so on. No donor recognition, no local events, no sponsorships, no personal biographies, no partnerships, no "Holy Cow!" projects that attract volunteers and resources. I don't even know who we're appealing to at this point or why they're even donating in the first place.

Kickstarter gets lots of notice (and rightfully so), but my long-time favorite has always been Kiva. The narrative and the stories are excellent. You understand exactly WHO you're helping and WHAT a difference it will make to them. All the rest - website copy, photos, testimonials - are helpful and arguably required, but those are all the supporting cast and crew. It's not even necessarily important to have slick, highly edited content (and sometimes detrimental since it can make donors feel like the organization doesn't need or won't appreciate their financial help). It just needs to tell a compelling story.

I'm wondering whether a good target donor audience is successful Korean Americans like many of my friends. Needs to be split-tested, but I'd bet the moon that direct video interviews with the kids (background, day in the life, hopes for the future) would be a big draw.

 

[Andy Black]

Can you bid on Korean phrases that indicate the searcher is Korean and maybe looking to help a charity? Note that the language of your ads would have to match your landing page.

 

[AmazingLarry]

At its core, fundraising is fundamentally about telling a story and asking strangers to help write the next chapter. The marketing strategies are almost exactly the same for non-profit and for-profit to my mind, but short shareable videos that tell a compelling story are the big lever for fundraising.

I started working recently with a local animal rescue group to assist with their fund raising. Pretty standard non-profit website, pictures, etc. basically begging for $$$. Although they've been around for 10+ years, they really haven't put any thought into the marketing basics: audience, donor profile, 80/20 breakdown, messaging and so on. No donor recognition, no local events, no sponsorships, no personal biographies, no partnerships, no "Holy Cow!" projects that attract volunteers and resources. I don't even know who we're appealing to at this point or why they're even donating in the first place.

Kickstarter gets lots of notice (and rightfully so), but my long-time favorite has always been Kiva. The narrative and the stories are excellent. You understand exactly WHO you're helping and WHAT a difference it will make to them. All the rest - website copy, photos, testimonials - are helpful and arguably required, but those are all the supporting cast and crew. It's not even necessarily important to have slick, highly edited content (and sometimes detrimental since it can make donors feel like the organization doesn't need or won't appreciate their financial help). It just needs to tell a compelling story.

I'm wondering whether a good target donor audience is successful Korean Americans like many of my friends. Needs to be split-tested, but I'd bet the moon that direct video interviews with the kids (background, day in the life, hopes for the future) would be a big draw.

This is awesome! I love the idea of short videos, and the more I think about it I realize a lot of successful organizations do this. We don't have any social media profiles set up yet, but this would work well on there as well as the website. I'm gonna have to make sure I get plenty of footage while they're here and get some interviews with the kids so I have a lot of content available to use when putting together videos.

I agree that Korean Americans are a great target audience. They can relate the most to the craziness of high school education in Korea and the important role it plays in your future.

Our organization is small now, but I really want to get the fundraising/marketing strategy solid early on, and I think videos like this will be a big part of it. Our vision for the future is to provide an avenue for these kids (and other orphans in Korea) to get an education in the United States through scholarships and taking care of the logistics, and this will require a lot of growth.

Thanks for the great advice!


Another unrelated thought I had about improving the website is to provide a few options when donating. If someone can choose specifically where they want their donation to go (museum visit, university tour, etc.) it makes it a little more tangible for them and gives them something specific tied to their donation.

We could also have a separate section for donating a meal, where there could be a few options for clicking on a restaurant logo and it would allow you to buy a gift card that would be sent to our organization to pay for a meal for the kids.

Can you bid on Korean phrases that indicate the searcher is Korean and maybe looking to help a charity? Note that the language of your ads would have to match your landing page.

Yes, this is a great idea. Putting together a Korean translated site is one of the big updates I have planned. I don't speak it fluently, but I do have a native speaker who can help. Once this is finished, I'll have to get ads set up for that. It would open up the reach quite a bit. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

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[Andy Black]

Yes, this is a great idea. Putting together a Korean translated site is one of the big updates I have planned. I don't speak it fluently, but I do have a native speaker who can help. Once this is finished, I'll have to get ads set up for that. It would open up the reach quite a bit. Thanks for the suggestion!

While you wait to get a Korean version of the website done you can bid on Korean keywords and show English ads that send people to an English landing page.

 

[AmazingLarry]

While you wait to get a Korean version of the website done you can bid on Korean keywords and show English ads that send people to an English landing page.

Awesome, that's perfect. Thank you!

 

[AmazingLarry]

Figured I would post an update on this. Maybe keep it going as a progress thread.

We ran our nonprofit program at the end of July, and it was a huge success!

I've spent the past few weeks doing a major overhaul on the website based on some amazing feedback that I got through different forum members. The whole site looks much better now and communicates our vision and what we do more clearly, so hopefully it'll convert better. Having a lot of photos and the experience of running through our first program helped a ton.

The site link is in the first post if anyone is interested BTW.

Next, I'll be focusing on Google ads. Refining the existing ads and keywords, and also adding Korean keywords.

After that, I'm going to get a Korean version of the site built.

 

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[Ela]

Stop using multiple font styles for every section. Just keep one standard style and size for every section like title, content..etc.

Increase the size of "Donate" buttons.

Add some videos in homepage, which will give more trust.

 

[shubham___3011]

Hey Larry good to see what you are doing.
Speaking of the conversion have you thought of changing your ads campaing? better audience, better placements and most importantly the copy and graphics you use for you ads

 

[Andy Black]

You know Google gives Google Ads grants of up to $10k/mth to qualifying non-profits/charities?

 

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[AmazingLarry]

You know Google gives Google Ads grants of up to $10k/mth to qualifying non-profits/charities?

Yes! You actually told me about grants earlier this year. It's all set up and running, just need to do some work optimizing it.

 

[AmazingLarry]

Finishing making our website multilingual, so it can now be toggled between English and Korean.

I also spent some time making changes to the keywords in Google Ads. I added some Korean keywords and English keywords as well.

Looking through the search term report, I'm getting a lot of unrelated search terms (all of our keywords are set to broad match). The search volume on our keywords is fairly low, but Google provides a significant monthly budget through their grant, so I figured it couldn't hurt to cast a wide net. Maybe this isn't the best strategy. I may try changing the keywords to exact or phrase match and see what changes.

I've also been thinking of other ways to reach our target audience, and I think there are a lot of ways other than Google ads that will be more effective. I still want to give the ads some attention, but I need to focus more on other strategies. I started a list of general ideas that need to be hashed out, so I'll be doing that in the coming weeks.

 

[AmazingLarry]

Figure I'd just turn this into a progress thread. Now that the website is all updated, I've just been focusing on different outreach methods to see what works best for us.

• Google Ads: In the past 2 months, we got 145 clicks to the website, but no conversions (donations). Looking at the search term report, almost all of the terms that resulted in clicks are really not applicable so it's not surprising we had no conversions. I didn't mess with exact/phrase/broad match yet, but I'm going to try using exact match only with very specific keywords, even if the volume is low. We did have one student from South Korea contact us through the website, and they wanted to get involved and also wanted to talk to us about their own project in Korea helping graduating orphan students transition to college or a job. We had a great phone call and they've helped us out a ton already, and we were able to provide some good advice.

• Radio Stations: I contacted a few different U.S. based Korean radio stations, and I'm talking to one of them about possibly partnering in some way. We don't have much to offer monetarily at this point, but we do have a few other sponsors and post their name and logo on our website, newsletter and T-shirts. We'll see what they say.

• Korean Churches: I found a U.S. Korean church database online that lists the name and email of the pastor at each church, so I put together a list and wrote up a nice email to send to them. I'm using a free plan on hunter.io to send out the emails and just started the campaign this week. I set up a new email account to use for this, and had some trouble with it getting locked, I'm assuming because I'm sending a lot of emails from a new account. This happened twice and I had to verify the account each time, but it looks like it's working now.

• Embassy: Over the holidays I met a missionary to Rwanda, and she has a lot of experience working and operating nonprofits. She was really interested in what we were doing, so we got coffee one day and she gave us a ton of good advice. One suggestion she had was to reach out to the Korean embassy in the U.S., so I have an email draft ready to go, and I'll be sending it out tomorrow.

• Instagram: We're also getting ready to reach out to some Instagram accounts to see if they would be willing to share some of our content. I've just identified around 10-15 accounts at this point, and I still need to figure out the best way to go about this. That's the next task on the list.

 

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[AmazingLarry]

Quick update.

Worked out a simple partnership with a Korean radio station in LA. They have a website with news, forums, classifieds, etc., and they offered to put an ad for our organization website on their home page for free. It went live yesterday, so that's cool. It seems like they are interested in getting more involved as time goes on too.

I've also been running an email campaign for Korean churches. I'm getting a 40% open rate, but no responses yet. Gonna start following up soon with the people who opened.

One other area of focus in the last month has been on local businesses owned by Korean Americans. I'm finishing up a simple flyer and I'm going to ask the small business owners if they would be willing to hang our flyer somewhere at their facility. I figured this would be a simple and easy ask as a way to develop a connection with some of these businesses and make them aware of what we're doing. Still thinking about if this is the best way to go about it though.