Active account management

As you likely know, the mission of Google Grants is to help you achieve your organization's goals by promoting your website via advertising on Google.com. And since the program began six years ago, we have thousands of organizations using Grants to do just that.

In an effort to make the next six years of Grants beneficial to as many organizations as possible, we've begun working on some program refinements that should help you make a bigger impact on your organization's mission and also lay the groundwork for new grantees looking to find success in the Google Grants program.

One of the ways we're looking to improve the success of all grantees is to encourage active engagement with your Google Grants AdWords accounts.

We have seen some impressive successes amongst grantees who login to their accounts frequently and work consistently to hone and improve the performance of their ads, and we want to see this same success across all of your accounts.

Whether you're logging in to refine your keyword lists, updating your ad creative to reflect new services or adding new adgroups to take advantage of seasonal events, the active management of your AdWords account is directly linked to the success of your campaigns and the impact your Grant can have for your organization.

To encourage active engagement with your accounts, we've looked closely into what constitutes an active and successful grantee, and will begin requiring all grantees to participate in the same level of engagement.

Beginning 5/1/09, we'll require all grantees to be engaged with the program and actively manage their Google Grants AdWords accounts. What this means to you, from an operating standpoint, is that you'll be asked to respond to email requests from our team and login to your account monthly to review your campaign's performance and make any applicable updates.

While this may not be a big change from what you're already doing, we're hoping this will guide new or unengaged grantees down a path to success with their Google Grant and that all organizations in the Google Grants program will be able to better serve their missions.

You've likely already received an email from our team about the specifics of this program change, but if you'd like to discuss this with other grantees, feel free to bring up the topic in the Google Grants Help Forum. If you have questions about your individual account, please contact our team directly.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team