Photo by Dave Hoefler

Case Study: Inspire Washington

"Discover What Moves You" · Nonprofit · Google Ad Grants · Paid & Organic Social · Digital Infrastructure Rescue
November 2025 – May 2026; via Team Soapbox

A suspended Google Ad Grants account. A six-week runway. Three stakeholder organizations. Zero conversion tracking. Here's how it still launched on time, in compliance, and proved the concept.

The Challenge

Inspire Washington, in partnership with Amazon and the Good Business Network of Washington, launched the Discover What Moves You Digital Passport Program in spring 2026 - a free, mobile-optimized experience encouraging Greater Seattle residents to explore the region's arts, heritage, science, and small business community. The program had a genuinely compelling offer: free to join, prize-eligible up to $500, 50+ partner locations across the region. What it didn't have, when I stepped in, was a functioning digital advertising account.

What had been described as a $10,000 paid Google Ads campaign turned out to be something else entirely: a Google Ad Grants account, Google's free advertising program for nonprofits, governed by an entirely different rulebook - a $329/day budget cap, mandatory Maximize Conversions bidding, strict keyword compliance, and a 5% click-through rate threshold to keep the account alive at all. The account was also suspended, the casualty of a previous manager's legislative-style ads that had triggered Google's political content policies. The suspension created a genuine Catch-22: the very assets causing the violation couldn't be removed, because the suspension itself blocked all account changes.

Layered on top of the Ad Grants account: a fragmented social ecosystem with no single owner. Multiple vendors had standing access with no clear accountability chain, and the program's actual conversion event - passport signup - happened on a third-party platform's subdomain, not on the client's own website. The program ran through May 31. The clock didn't pause for any of this.

The Approach

Working collaboratively with Team Soapbox, I led the technical rescue and rebuild of the Google Ad Grants account while simultaneously managing paid and organic social strategy across the full program season.

The reinstatement came first, because nothing else could happen without it. I diagnosed the specific compliance violations, then drafted a direct appeal to Google Ad Grants support that named the violations precisely, demonstrated the account was already being corrected, and made one clear ask: a temporary lift so the flagged assets could be removed, or manual removal by Google's own team. Once Google lifted the suspension, the cleanup took under fifteen minutes - disapproved assets removed, the old campaign paused, account-level negative keywords added.

From there, I built three fully compliant search campaigns from scratch, each targeting a distinct audience rather than running one generic catch-all:
1. DWMY_Families for parents seeking kid-friendly activities;
2. DWMY_CultureExplorers for arts and museum seekers, and the highest search-volume opportunity;
3. DWMY_ShopLocal for community and small-business-minded searchers with the warmest intent signal.
Keeping these as separate campaigns, rather than ad groups under one umbrella, meant independent budgets, independent reporting, and a Google algorithm that could learn each audience on its own terms instead of averaging across all three.

Every build decision was shaped by the account's specific failure risks. Phrase Match kept spend off irrelevant queries - critical given how often the word "passport" pulls in searches for US government travel documents; all ad copy was shifted from "passport" to "arts pass" language to reduce that confusion at the source. A dedicated negative keyword list blocked travel-passport terms at the campaign level. Audience targeting ran in Observation mode rather than hard Targeting, so the keywords did the work of reaching intent without artificially narrowing reach during a short launch window. AI Max was deliberately left off - the feature's learning period was a luxury a three-week runway couldn't afford.

The conversion tracking problem required a different kind of work entirely. The program's actual conversion event lived on a Bandwango subdomain, outside the website developer's control, which meant the obvious fix - installing a tag on discoverwhatmovesyou.com - wouldn't capture the action Google needed to see. Solving it meant becoming the connective tissue between people who'd never spoken to each other: the client's web developer, the Good Business Network's platform contact, and Google's own requirements, each fluent in a different part of the problem. The interim solution - tracking outbound clicks from the website into the signup flow as a proxy for intent - kept the account compliant while the permanent subdomain fix was scoped.

The Ad Grants rescue ran inside a longer, larger engagement: a full paid and organic social program across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn spanning the program's entire six-month run, November 26, 2025 through May 31, 2026. The two weren't separate workstreams. Search captured people actively looking for something to do; social built the awareness and credibility that got them looking in the first place, and kept them engaged between passport check-ins. Organic content tracked the program's real-world calendar - specific exhibits, lectures, performances, and partner events - so the feed read as a living guide to what was actually happening across the region rather than generic brand content. Paid social ran in parallel across Meta and LinkedIn, with audience strategy, creative briefing, and real-time optimization informed by which organic content was already resonating. Over the full season, that meant 199 organic posts published and continuous paid management across five channels, with reporting produced for program leadership, Amazon, and the Good Business Network throughout - not just at the end.

The Results

Google Ad Grants (May 20–31, 2026 · 10-day launch window)

  • 14.29% account-wide click-through rate, nearly 3x the 5% Ad Grants minimum

  • 25% CTR on the Culture Explorers campaign specifically — the clearest proof the targeting strategy was right

  • 90.2% optimization score across all three campaigns

  • 3 campaigns, 6 ad groups, launched and paused on schedule with zero rebuild needed for next season

Paid Social (Meta & LinkedIn · November 2025 – May 2026)

  • 526,948 impressions

  • 13,712 clicks at $0.28 average CPC

  • 42,282 video views at $0.09 per view

  • $3,906.75 total spend

Organic Social (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn · November 2025 – May 2026)

  • 227,518 impressions

  • 10,565 engagements at a 4.6% engagement rate

  • 462 net new followers · 199 posts published

Starting context: a suspended ad account locked by its own violations, no conversion tracking in place, and a passport program with six weeks left on the clock.

Beyond the Campaign

What this engagement actually required wasn't campaign execution - that part was the easy half. It required diagnosing a catch-22 Google itself had created and getting a real human at Google to fix it. It required translating between a website developer, a platform vendor, and an ad platform's technical requirements, none of whom shared a vocabulary. And it required naming the conversion tracking gap clearly in every report rather than quietly working around it, so leadership understood exactly what the data could and couldn't tell them - and what to fix before the next season.

The account today is clean, documented, and paused on purpose: structure, keywords, ad copy, and site-links all intact, ready to relaunch 3–4 weeks ahead of the next program cycle with no rebuild required.

Digital Platforms: Google Search (Ad Grants) · Facebook · Instagram · LinkedIn · Audience Networks

Services: Google Ad Grants Reinstatement · Search Campaign Strategy & Build · Paid Social Strategy · Organic Content Strategy · Conversion Tracking Diagnosis · Cross-Vendor Technical Coordination · Executive Reporting & Presentation · Digital Infrastructure Recommendations

The full campaign report and Google Ad Grants strategy deck - including the complete performance data behind these numbers - are available on the password-protected Samples of Work page; password available upon request.