This summer, Acton recruited a group of interns from around the world. Throughout the summer, Acton’s skilled interns helped create advertisements for a wider audience. Three interns hailing from Venezuela, Brazil and Hungary were hired for Acton’s emerging leaders program. In addition to these international students, several American interns were skilled in foreign languages and familiar with cultures around the world.
Prior to the Acton internship, Claire Bokma, a development department intern, studied in Jordan, which broadened her knowledge of the languages and cultures in the Middle East. Canaan Harris, an executive office intern, recently spent a summer in Spain and is fluent in Spanish. Through an international business class, development intern Dominique Scalisi made connections around the world and put those connections to use by translating ads into languages such as Arabic and Urdu.
Google offers grants to non-profit organizations to create advertisements using Google AdWords. These are the small text ads that pop up alongside search results. As a non-profit, Acton receives $500,000 from Google annually, which is then used to increase Acton’s online reach around the world.
Interns were assigned the responsibility of managing Acton’s Google AdWords account. The interns created advertisements for Acton’s blog posts and targeted these ads to countries around the world in a variety of languages. The top five most successful ads were not in English but rather in Urdu, Spanish and Arabic.
The interns successfully “maxed out” the AdWords account each day, meaning they used the entire allotted daily budgets and left no grant funds unused. The number of people who saw the ads tripled, while those who actually clicked on the ads increased almost 200 percent. They increased the blog’s traffic by more than 40 percent and reached over 152,000 people (and counting) solely through strategically targeted ads in a foreign language. The interns used their abilities to reach countries around the world and spread Acton’s message to those seeking liberty near and far.
