Last year I wrote a blog post about the Google Grants scheme, where the internet giant will offer free advertising to suitable charities – worth potentially as much as £80,000 per year.

I pinged it out to a few places, but didn’t hear much back – until earlier this week.

A “London organisation”, who remains nameless outside my flat for confidential reasons, contacted me to say that they had filed an application – and have now been approved for the Grant scheme.

Which was rather nice to hear.

With museums, etc facing a dearth of taxpayer funds this year, here is a large company offering venues the chance to boost their public profile quite significantly and completely free of charge – so I think it is something that should be highlighted (again).

It won’t directly pay the heating bills, but the offer of a ton of free publicity on the Google UK website is not to be lightly dismissed. Is it?

For example, someone looking online for specific  information about a writer, artist or period of history might get a lot of pages about their request, but the museum/charity might not appear near the top in the results for various reasons.

Google Grants will let them stick an advert at the top of the webpage – free of charge – so that this already interested person can be told about the place, and lured into paying a visit.

Google will help to send people to the museum or charity website – and it is then up to them to convert that web visitor into a physical visitor stepping through the door of the museum and spending money in the gift shop, or whatever.

I know that some smaller museums/charities can be a bit scared of “doing things online”, but managing the Google Grant adverts is so simple that really anyone can do it, and it doesn’t require that small website to be upgraded to the latest whizz-bang functions, although it does need to be reasonably decent.

Frankly, if you are a museum or charity, apart from some time filling in forms, what have you got to lose?

More on my original blog post.

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