If you haven’t learned about Google Grants yet, you’re missing out. The program offers enormous benefits to small-to-midsize non-profit organizations, including up to $10,000 a month in free Google Adwords advertising, PLUS free contribution processing through Google Checkout. The money saved alone is an enormous in-kind contribution from Google, and the extra web traffic you can drive with effective use of Adwords can have a major impact on your revenue.

If you’re not familiar with Adwords, that’s what Google uses to drive the paid advertising that shows up when you do a Google search, and that also shows up on a variety of websites. Basically, you choose a set of words you think people who would support your organization might be searching for, like “advanced prostate cancer”. Then, when someone uses that search term, Google serves up your ad along with the unpaid “organic” search results. If the searcher clicks on your ad, your account is “charged” for the click.

The program requires very little in the way of qualifications – you must be a 501(c)3 registered with the IRS, you must submit some thoughts about your keywords and your ads, you must measure the effectiveness of the ads (which you should be doing anyway!) and you must stay in touch with Google regularly – that’s about it!

Here’s a valuable blog post about the experiences of one non-profit, the National Women’s Law Center, as they got up to speed in making use of their Google Grants advertising budget.