To the UK charity sector —
On the $10,000 a month most charities never see.
I've been in the advertising game for over a decade. I built and ran an ad agency for nine years before exiting in 2024, and across that time one of the most uncomfortable patterns I kept seeing was what happens to charities on the Google Ad Grant.
If you don't know the programme: Google gives every registered non‑profit a $10,000 per month grant in search ad credits. $10k a month in free advertising. On paper, it's one of the most generous corporate giveaways in the world.
In practice, it's almost completely broken.
The grant comes with rules — strict ones. Keyword‑level quality scores have to stay above a threshold. CTR has to clear 5%. Single‑word keywords aren't allowed. Broad match is heavily restricted. CPC caps sit at $2 unless you're using specific bid strategies. Accounts have to be structured a certain way, with minimum campaign counts and ad group counts, or the grant gets suspended.
To deploy the full $10,000 a month, you need someone who knows Google Ads properly, who can monitor the account daily, who can rebuild structure when it drifts, and who can write ads that actually convert. That's a job. A real one. Most charities can't afford to fill it.
So what happens is exactly what you'd expect. The biggest charities — Cancer Research, RNLI, Macmillan — have proper marketing teams or paid agencies, and they deploy close to the full $10k. The small local charity gets the same $10k allocation on paper, but without the expertise to manage it, they end up spending $200 to $500 a month before Google's compliance triggers kick in or their campaigns simply stop serving. A children's hospice in Lincoln and a global cancer charity get offered the same amount. One uses it all. The other uses three percent of it.
The grant is technically equal.
The outcome is wildly unequal.
This is something I wanted to fix when I was running the agency. We talked about it more than once. But the maths never worked. Agencies operate on time. A senior account manager handling a charity grant account would need three or four hours a week to keep it healthy. With agency overheads — office, salaries, software, taxes — that's £800 to £1,200 of cost per month per account. Even if we discounted heavily, we'd be losing money on every charity we took on, and a small agency can only absorb so much loss before the lights go out. So we never did it. I always felt bad about it.
Why Overtime makes this finally possible
Overtime is the agency I would have built if I were starting from scratch in 2026. Instead of human account managers, our AI agents — Carrie for Google Ads, Olivia for client communication — run campaigns autonomously, around the clock. Carrie analyses accounts every few hours, pauses wasted spend, rewrites underperforming ads, restructures campaigns, enforces grant compliance, and reports back. Olivia handles the questions.
The economics are different. Because the agents work across every client account in parallel, the marginal cost of adding another charity to our system is tiny — not zero, but a fraction of what it would cost a traditional agency. And because we've built the compliance rules directly into Carrie's logic, the things that get small charities suspended on the grant — broad match keywords, single‑word keywords, quality score drops, CTR drift — get caught and fixed automatically. Day one. Continuously.
This means we can do something we genuinely couldn't have done before: support charities of every size on the same level the biggest organisations get. Same quality of management. Same level of attention. The same agency‑grade work that costs £2,000 a month — delivered to a charity for free.
What we're committing to
We're starting with 20 UK charities. We're picking 20 because we want to do this properly, not at scale before we've proved it — partner with each one, get their grant performing, build case studies, and learn what works for the sector before we open it wider.
The numbers, to put it plainly:
At conventional agency rates of £1,500–£2,000 per account per month, the management itself would cost charities £30,000–£40,000 a month — over £400,000 a year — to receive this level of attention. We're absorbing that cost entirely. No card, no trial expiry, no upsell, no catch.
Why we're doing this
The honest answer is that we're founders who build for the love of the game. We love what we do. Overtime is going to be successful in its own right — paying customers are signing up every week — and absorbing the cost of 20 charity accounts doesn't break us. It does cost us something, but it's worth it.
The good charities do in the world is real, measurable, and disproportionately benefits people who don't have other support. If we can route a few hundred thousand pounds of free advertising to charities that would otherwise leave it on the table, that's a meaningful thing to spend a year of company time on.
It also proves something about Overtime. The same system that manages a £50,000‑a‑month e‑commerce account can manage a $10,000 grant account for a local charity with the same rigour. No corner‑cutting. No "we'll get to you when we have time." Same Carrie. Same Olivia. Same standard.
If you run a registered UK charity and your Google Ad Grant is sitting underused, apply through our charity programme. We'll review every application and onboard the first 20 that fit. After that, we'll open it to more.
This is what Overtime was built to do.
