How Blue Train Marketing Helped Pennies Maximise Google Ad Grants, Increase Awareness, and Reach Prospective Charity and Retail Partners.
Every 0.5 seconds, someone chooses to donate with Pennies, whether they are buying a coffee, ordering a takeaway, or picking up shopping essentials.
By enabling shoppers to make a small digital donation when paying, Pennies has helped raise millions of pounds for good causes across the UK. It’s a powerful reminder that when enough people do something small, the collective impact can be life- changing.
To help more charities and retailers become part of that movement, Pennies partnered with Blue Train Marketing on a pro bono basis. Our objective was to maximise the charity’s use of Google Ad Grants, increase its visibility and support the development of new charity and retail partnerships.
Pennies is an award-winning UK charity that makes giving part of everyday life. Through its digital micro-donation technology, retailers invite customers to add a small charitable donation to their purchase at checkout, with every penny going to charity.
Working with leading retailers and household-name charities, Pennies has enabled millions of individual micro-donations to good causes through simple, frictionless giving.
Like many charities, Pennies needed to make the marketing resources work as hard as possible.
The Google Ad Grants programme provided access to valuable monthly Google Ads spend. But while the grant offered significant opportunity, it also came with stricter limitations than a standard paid Google Ads account.
Campaigns must maintain a minimum 5% click-through rate to remain eligible for the grant. That means performance isn’t simply an achievement: consistently falling below the threshold could put access to the grant at risk.
For Pennies, the challenge was therefore twofold. We needed to maximise the value of the available advertising budget while ensuring campaigns continue to meet the requirements needed to maintain the grant.
Unlike a standard paid campaign, there is less flexibility to simply increase bids, raise the budget, or pay for greater visibility. Success depends much more heavily on getting the fundamentals right: building a strong campaign structure, targeting the right keywords, creating high-quality landing pages, and continually optimising performance.
Pennies also faced the challenge of engaging two distinct audiences: charities seeking sustainable new fundraising opportunities, and retailers and eCommerce businesses looking to build social purpose into the customer journey. The challenge was to reach both groups with relevant messaging and encourage organisations to explore a partnership with Pennies.
The opportunity was clear, but unlocking it required ongoing testing, careful optimisation, and a strategy capable of evolving alongside audience behaviour and the rigid requirements of the grant.
Blue Train Marketing was tasked with helping Pennies:
The partnership began in 2023 with the launch of two targeted Google Ads campaigns.
The first focused on charities, introducing organisations to Pennies as an innovative fundraising partner that could help generate additional charitable income through everyday digital transactions.
The second targeted retailers and eCommerce businesses, demonstrating how integrating Pennies at checkout could create a seamless giving experience for customers while strengthening their social impact initiatives.
To maximise campaign performance, Blue Train Marketing developed and refined dedicated landing pages, optimising their messaging, structure, and user experience to encourage conversions. We also implemented conversion tracking, enabling Pennies to measure campaign performance and continually improve results.
We worked closely with the Pennies team to monitor performance, review insights, and identify opportunities for continuous improvement through regular monthly collaboration.
As the campaigns matured, search data revealed another opportunity: ensuring Pennies remained prominent when potential partners, supporters, and stakeholders searched for Pennies by name.
In 2025, we introduced branded search campaigns alongside the existing audience-focused activity. These campaigns helped ensure that Pennies remains highly visible whenever potential partners, supporters, or stakeholders search for information about the charity.
The branded campaigns achieved a strong click-through rate of 18.5%, while generating more than 1,000 impressions and 179 clicks during 2025.
The results demonstrated the value of continually refining the strategy as audience behaviour and organisational priorities evolved.
Blue Train Marketing supported Pennies by:
Through regular collaboration, shared planning, and ongoing optimisation, Blue Train Marketing became a trusted extension of the Pennies team, helping the charity make the most of every opportunity to grow its visibility and reach.
Natalie Charlotte Hensen-Smith, Content Marketing Manager at Pennies, said:
“We’ve been extremely impressed with the support we’ve received from Blue Train on our Google Ads. The team is proactive, responsive, and truly committed to delivering great results.
Jeff and Naiyan have been fantastic to work with – knowledgeable, supportive, and always providing clear, valuable insights.
We’re especially pleased to have achieved an 18.5% click through rate, well above average benchmarks, which really highlights the quality of their work.
Blue Train feel like a true extension of our team, and we’re excited to continue working together.”
Through its ongoing pro bono partnership with Pennies, Blue Train Marketing has helped the charity:
Our partnership with Pennies has always been about more than optimising Google Ads.
It’s about helping a remarkable charity amplify its mission, ensuring more retailers, charities, and consumers can become part of something bigger. Every new partnership creates more opportunities for everyday purchases to become everyday acts of generosity.
Looking for a marketing partner that combines strategic thinking with genuine collaboration to deliver meaningful, measurable results. We’d love to start that conversation.
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