Once a year Google emails Ad Grant recipients a programme survey. It takes about fifteen minutes. Ignore it and the grant can be deactivated — and this is the only compliance rule that has nothing at all to do with how the account performs.
What the survey is
Google runs the Ad Grants programme as philanthropy, and philanthropy has to report on itself. The annual survey is how Google collects the impact data it publishes: how many donations the grant drove, how many volunteers it recruited, how many people found a service they needed. Your answers roll up into the programme's own numbers.
It is short. Most of it is multiple choice, plus a few free-text boxes about outcomes. There is no wrong answer and nothing you can fail on content — the only failure mode is not responding.
Why so many accounts miss it
Every reason is administrative, not technical:
- It goes to the account's registered email, which is often a founder who
left, an intern who set the grant up in 2021, or an
info@alias nobody reads. - It arrives once a year, so it has no rhythm. Nobody is watching for it the way they watch for a monthly report.
- It looks like marketing. A survey request from Google, sent to a shared inbox, gets filed with the newsletters.
- The agency assumes the nonprofit handles it, and the nonprofit assumes the agency does. This is the most common one we see, and it is worth settling in writing.
Deactivation for a missed survey is fully recoverable. Unlike a policy breach, there is nothing to rebuild — you complete the survey, request reactivation, and the account comes back. The cost is the weeks of lost traffic in between, not the grant itself.
Making sure it reaches a human
Four things, none of which take longer than the survey itself.
- Check who owns the account. In Google Ads, Admin → Access and security. Look at every user with Admin rights and ask whether that person still works there. Remove the ones who do not.
- Point the contact email at a monitored inbox, ideally a shared one with at least two people in it rather than one individual.
- Put a recurring reminder in a shared calendar. Annually, in the month you were approved, titled clearly enough that a successor understands it. "Check for Google Ad Grants annual survey" beats "Google admin".
- Name one person. If you use an agency, write into the scope which side completes it. Ambiguity here is what causes the miss.
Answering it well
Completing the survey is enough to stay compliant, but there is a reason to do it properly. The free-text answers are read, and the programme's published impact figures come from them. Organisations that report concrete outcomes are the ones Google draws on for case studies.
So have the numbers ready before you open it:
- Conversions from grant traffic over the past twelve months, broken out by type — donations, volunteer sign-ups, service enquiries, newsletter subscriptions.
- Donation value attributed to the grant, if your platform passes revenue back.
- One specific story. Not "we raised awareness" — something like "412 carers downloaded the support guide, and 38 joined a local group as a result".
If you cannot answer those, the problem is upstream of the survey: the account is not measuring anything. That is worth fixing regardless, and it is covered in conversion tracking a board will believe.
If you have already been deactivated for it
The sequence is short:
- Log into Google for Nonprofits and check for an outstanding survey. Complete it.
- Confirm the account is otherwise compliant — CTR, keywords, structure — because reactivation review will look, and it is embarrassing to fix one thing and get held on another.
- Request reactivation through Ad Grants support.
- Fix the contact email while you are in there, so it does not recur.
If the review turns up other breaches, the full list is in the Ad Grant policy checklist, and the appeal itself works the way reinstatement does.
The wider point
The survey is one instance of a general problem: the Ad Grant has obligations that arrive by email, once, to an address that decays. The annual survey is the one with teeth, but the same failure mode loses organisations their Google for Nonprofits verification and their billing contact.
Fixing the inbox fixes all three at once. It is the cheapest compliance work available.