This October our Ad Grants account was deactivated, and we were informed by Google Support that we needed to target our ads only within Canada to reactivate our account. We herewith explain why we are targeting outside Canada, asking the Ad Grants Team to re-assess this decision.
- 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, carrying out pastoral or missionary work”. This is the legal basis for our church to operate in Canada – and also for our registration with Google Grants.
- Our mega goal is to promote inter-religious dialogue between the main world religions in an open and friendly and informed format.
- Reference the Bible as the central text for our church. From its very beginning the Bible forms a vision, and thus a mandate for ‘all nations’ – not just for our own. Some quotes show this:
“…through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed” (Genesis 22:18, 2000BC)
“…the Sovereign Lord will make righteousness and praise spring up before all nations.” (Isaiah 61:11 700BC)
“…Therefore go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19 – Jesus Christ 30AD)
‘Nations’ in the Bible does not mean the political nation states of our modern day, but refers to people who share a common language – it is a linguistic rather than political classification.
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 his Google+ blog he affirms that “openness is a core value at Google”. 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 Canadian religious charity to teach biblical precepts; with the l mandate to go to nations beyond just our own; 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 (https://urdu.al-injil.info/) to share the historical, cultural and spiritual information of the Bible to Urdu-speakers. Since our Ad Grants began in early 2016, we have continued to invest in Urdu-language content to our site.
Consequently, we have been targeting our ads where Urdu-speakers live: Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, etc. The content on our website 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 religious 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 serving an information need for Urdu-speakers. 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.
Sincerely,
Ragnar Oborn
+1 (506) 259-2255