NONPROFIT

SEO Driven Website and Digital Marketing Increase Donations for a Major Oregon Nonprofit

 

Challenge

Advocates for Life Skills and Opportunities (ALSO) is a nonprofit organization in Portland, Oregon that provides support services to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. ALSO partnered with Pineapple Digital in December 2021 to increase the nonprofit’s brand awareness, boost website traffic and drive online donations and job applications.

Solution

Through data-driven SEO and paid advertising strategies, Pineapple Digital grew ALSO’s website traffic exponentially year over year, improved their rankings on page one of Google search results, increased the company’s website conversions organically and, through Google Ads, significantly increased their donations and job applications.

Key Action Items
  • Writing and implementing a new site structure with updated meta titles and descriptions.
  • Optimizing content for search keywords on all the main pages on their website.
  • Designing and developing location landing pages for key service areas.
  • Creating fresh, unique keyword-rich SEO content for an overarching blog strategy.
  • Running impactful pay-per-click Google Ad campaigns.
Google Ads Grant Program

In December 2021, the Pineapple Digital Team worked with ALSO to obtain approval and receive Google Grant monies for their marketing programs. Google awards non-profits up to $10,000 per month in free advertising to be used on its platform. Once approved, Pineapple Digital managed highly successful Google ad campaigns to achieve the following goals:

  • Drive awareness of ALSO with branded ads
  • Educate the public using ALSO blog posts
  • Bring awareness to ALSO program services
  • Drive traffic to increase ALSO donations
  • Get workforce leads for ALSO organization

Results

As a result of all our efforts, ALSO experienced immediate positive impacts both internally and externally. Externally, through web traffic growth, they gained significant recognition and respect as a major non-profit organization in the State of Oregon, and their site now enjoys strong “authority” with Google. In addition, the marketing campaigns contributed to boosting employee and stakeholder morale and pride. They quickly realized that “SEO is an important part of our marketing tool set we need to succeed and grow going forward.” 

Within the first year as our client, we achieved the following results for ALSO:

  • Drove 31,600 new visits to the site with 544,000 impressions
  • Generated 63 conversions and donations
  • Spent $82,700 of Google’s free ad grant money
  • Met Google’s strict requirements to maintain the free ad grant

Accelerated growth in website sessions: 

  • More than 96,000 sessions from all traffic and over 24,000 sessions from organic traffic since the start of work.
  • When comparing the specified time frame to the prior period, we increased overall sessions by 127% and organic traffic:
  • Decreased bounce rate for all traffic by 32% and organic traffic by 13%.
  • Increased the number of clicks and impressions organically. There have been 13.3k clicks and 726k impressions since the start of work.
  • Since the start of work, there were 32,284 goal completions for all traffic, and 11,911 goal completions for organic traffic.

Building on that momentum from our first year we have now:

  • Reached 207,000 new visits with 3,670,000 impressions.
  • Generated 10,436 conversions including donations.
  • Spent $186,000 of Google’s free ad grant money.
  • Continued following Google’s updated strict grant policies.
Continued Growth in Website Sessions: 

  • More than 246,000 sessions from all traffic and over 138,000 sessions from organic traffic:
  • Increased the number of clicks and impressions organically. There have been 50.2k clicks and 3.67m impressions since October, 2023:
  • With Pineapple Digital’s expertise, ALSO achieved major milestones—growing website traffic, strengthening organic reach and maximizing Google’s nonprofit ad grant to drive donations and job applications.

Client Testimonials

Pineapple Digital is not only ALSO’s search engine optimization (SEO) contractor, but an essential part of our website maintenance. They service the backend, restore the website if it crashes, and provide supports during times of uncertainty. This includes the current issue between WP Engine (what we use for our website) and WordPress, where WordPress has revoked certain access and tools to WP Engine users, such as automatic security updates that Pineapple Digital is now updating themselves.

As of right now, outside our SEO, we have no marketing that reaches people who have never heard of us before. We are not running ads in print magazines or business journals or paying for boosted posts on social media accounts. How people are learning about us is either entirely on word of mouth or by searching for a business like us on search engines.

Without Pineapple Digital, we are likely to lose our Google Ad Grant, which gives us $10,000 worth of Google ads each month, of which Pineapple Digital has been able to make good use of to support our fundraising and events, DSP recruitment, and helping prospective new clients find us. That $10,000 in Google Ad Grant money in the last month brought 3k visits to our website. And Pineapple’s efforts to optimize our content means that we get about 4.1k visits to our website brought in through organic search (finding us through Google searches) last month. The earliest historical data I can find is from May 2022, in which Pineapple was helping us, but it takes time for changes to take effect, so in May 2022, we only had 1.5k paid search visits and 1.3k in organic search. The algorithm is constantly changing, and they keep in line with those changes as they happen. Even if we lost them for a year, we would lose a lot of the progress that has already been made.

– Sarah Cinquini, Stewardship Director

“I cannot say enough positive things about Pineapple Digital. Advocates for Life Skills and Opportunity provides support services for people with disabilities and their families, as a nonprofit we rely heavily on our website to connect with our community.

Since partnering with Pineapple Digital, we couldn’t be happier with the results. Thanks to their efforts, we have seen an impressive increase in traffic to our website and a substantial improvement in the awareness of our nonprofit. Additionally, we now have a phenomenal website, full of resources for our community to utilize, i.e. a wide variety of blogs and resource pages.

But what really sets Pineapple Digital apart for me, is the care and compassion they bring to their work. From the very beginning, the team showed genuine interest in our mission and took the time to learn about our organization’s unique needs and challenges. They went above and beyond to take the time to explain everything they were doing, as well as answering the many questions we had about the process. Their enthusiasm for our success was evident in every interaction we had with them. We are so grateful for their help in spreading awareness about our organization.

I highly recommend Pineapple Digital to any nonprofit looking to improve its online presence.”

– Lindsay Meadows, Administrative and Events Manager