Case Study Content – GVNG
GVNGorg is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles. GVNG specializes in a unique segment of the nonprofit world – fiscally sponsored projects. GVNG’s corporate and celebrity clients raise many millions of dollars and run charitable projects under the auspices of GVNG. It’s a complex business in a niche that doesn’t typically get much exposure, but when people and companies find out they can do the sort projects that GVNG enables, they usually become GVNG clients.
GVNG‘s Unique Challenge
The “find out about GVNG” part above was where the work needed to be done. GVNG provides by far the best tech platform in its industry and a unique service. But GVNG is a nonprofit with very tight budgets and the strong desire to use donated money for charitable impact rather than marketing. The challenge was to raise the profile of not just GVNG, but the entire fiscal sponsor concept, and do it on a minimal budget with directly quantifiable ROI.
Our Partnership with GVNG
Given the tight budgets and the lack of knowledge about GVNG’s nonprofit markets and business, Clarity Digital needed to rely heavily on its client, GVNG, to provide content, ideas, competitive info, target demographics, and market dynamics. A highly productive relationship was built that maximized the strengths of both organizations. One excellent example was in content creation. The GVNG team would provide content ideas or outlines and the Clarity team transformed them into optimized-for-SEO articles that we deployed across multiple channels.
Digital Strategy and Solution Architecture
As always, the first step of the project was to conduct a thorough analysis of the current state. GVNG had done a pretty good job of building its own website, with keyword-heavy content, good graphics, and a logical flow. There simply wasn’t enough traffic. Clarity Digital built a roadmap to improve several key areas while keeping costs down:
Website Redesign
Problem: GVNG’s original website was hand-coded, making it difficult to manage, update, and scale. The user interface (UI) and overall user experience (UX) were outdated, limiting engagement and hindering conversions.timized for engagement or conversion.
Solution: Clarity Digital led a full-scale website redesign, rebuilding the site in WordPress for easier management and scalability. We expanded the site architecture to include SEO-optimized pages and richer content, significantly improving search visibility and usability. Custom landing pages and conversion-focused lead capture forms were introduced to support paid media efforts, while a new blog section laid the foundation for ongoing content marketing and organic growth.
Digital PR
Problem: Required to raise awareness in target markets. Very little is written about fiscal sponsors. There’s a general lack of knowledge of what GVNG and other fiscal sponsors do and why it might be the solution a prospective client is seeking.
Solution: Get content published in reputable, recognized online publications.
SEO & AI search optimization
Problem: GVNG had done a reasonably decent job in the past with traditional search and SEO, mostly with keywords and content on the GVNG website. Then came AI search and GVNG started slipping down the search rankings.
Solution: Build content for AI search and ensure that it’s well-distributed via Digital PR, social media, and all other relevant channels. Build a strong association in AI models for “fiscal sponsor” and “GVNG”, so when somebody does a search for “fiscal sponsor” GVNG will show up at the top of the page.
Content writing and optimization
Problem: GVNG had some well-written content on its site, but there was nowhere near enough and it was not being distributed via any other channels.
Solution: Collaborate very tightly with GVNG to produce more content. Since GVNG’s market is unlike any other, the Clarity team relied on GVNG to produce topics and outlines, which Clarity then optimized for SEO and distribution.
Social media outreach and content
Problem: The GVNG team had social media accounts on all the relevant platforms, but did little posting and no marketing on any of the social media platforms.
Solution: Clarity’s social media team managed GVNG’s social media accounts and published numerous new articles and other content. Links across channels helped greatly increase exposure, credibility, and SEO rankings.
Paid media and digital ads
Problem: Money, plain and simple. As a nonprofit, GVNG had almost always avoided paid media because any dollars spent on marketing are dollars not used for charitable impact.
Solution: Demonstrable return on investment. Clarity Digital built a very tightly budgeted ad strategy and optimized it daily to zero in on the highest value ads and increase conversions.
Results
In a word – outstanding. GVNG’s lead flow increased 10x within 90 days of deploying all of the strategies described above. GVNG has been in business for about 7 years. The tightly-budgeted paid media campaign completely delivered on the ROI promise – GVNG doubled its number of clients in 60 days after launching the ads. The monthly ad cost was about 10% of the additional revenue GVNG realized from the additional business that converted from the ads.
The Digital PR campaign was also very successful, leading to articles published in Forbes and other reputable online publications. Digital PR was also a key component of greatly improved AI search results.
Testimonial
From Mark Gleason, former Director of Product & Marketing at GVNG Technologies:
“Clarity Digital steered us where GVNG needed to go. I’m an old hand at what we think of as traditional SEO, which is tons of content splashed everywhere and stuffing websites with keywords and backlinks. That doesn’t work the way it used to and it wasn’t working for GVNG. Clarity Digital showed us not just how to use new strategies, but how to optimize those strategies on a tight budget. The other key was the partnership approach. GVNG’s esoteric business is not something that can be easily understood by outsiders, so we couldn’t just flip the whole project over to Clarity and tell them to make it happen. The teams from Clarity Digital and GVNG constantly collaborated on almost every aspect, which led to high quality results delivered quickly with fantastic ROI“
