This October our Ad Grants account was deactivated and we were informed by Google Support that we had to target our ads within Canada only to reactivate our account. We herewith explain why we are targeting outside Canada, asking the Ad Grants Team to re-assess this decision.
1. Perth-Andover Baptist Church is a Canadian registered religious charity – a church. As such we must be about the “advancement of religion”, specifically “to preach and advance the spiritual teachings of a religious faith … providing religious instruction”. This is the legal basis for our church to operate in its worldwide mission – and also for our registration with Google Grants.
2. The bible is the central text for our church, giving a mandate for ‘all nations’ (see Genesis 22:18, Isaiah 61:11, Matthew 28:19), forming a vision and a mission for other nations than solely our own. ‘Nations’ in the bible refers to people who share a common language – it is a linguistic rather than political classification. So it is not uncommon for a religious charity to partner with language groups.
3. Google’s core mission is to make “the world’s” information “universally accessible”. This reflects Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin’s conviction that “knowledge is always good” and “more of it should be shared.” In this same spirit Google promotes Ad Grants where Canadian charities are invited to “share your cause with the world” and “your story with audiences all over the globe.”
In light of our legal responsibility as a religious charity; with our historic mandate to partner with other language groups; and in the spirit of Google’s Grant program to share information openly and freely across the globe, our church developed an Urdu-language distance education component to our website (http://urdu.al-injil.info/) to share the historical, cultural and spiritual information of the bible to Urdu-speakers in the Urdu language. Here is our page listing our Urdu-language partnerships. For two years we have successfully continued to invest in Urdu-language content.
Consequently, we have been targeting our ads where Urdu-speakers live: Canada, USA, UK, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, UAE, etc. Our content and our ads, are not political, they do not advocate in country referendums, nor do they seek to raise funds – we simply provide a free online distance educational service to a language group that does not have comparable access to the same information as we have in Canada. With our high CTR (10% last month) and Analytics Goal conversion (12% multi-page viewing) we know we are responding to demand from Urdu-speakers, thus stimulating increased Google traffic.
So we ask Ad Grants to allow us to continue sharing information with Urdu-speakers “all over the globe” as per the mandate of your generous program.
Thank you for all of your efforts in helping us excel as a white-listed Google Grants partner.
Sincerely,
Reverend Mike Fredericks
Perth-Andover Baptist Church Pastor
506-273-6691
Ragnar Oborn
Online distance education curriculum developer
506-259-2255