Is Your Nonprofit Missing Out on the "Biggest Screen" in the House?

Connected TV (CTV) advertising is often viewed as a "big brand only" channel, but modern streaming inventory is making television marketing increasingly accessible and affordable for nonprofits. In this episode, Chris Johns, founder and CEO of AdGood, explains how organizations can leverage unused streaming inventory to drive donor acquisition and brand awareness with budgets as low as $250. The conversation breaks down the technicalities of CTV, the importance of human-centric creative hooks, and tactical approaches to omnichannel attribution using QR codes and retargeting tags. Additionally, the episode explores how AI-driven ad tools are removing production barriers by generating editable video content directly from a nonprofit's website, allowing even small teams to treat marketing as a disciplined, scalable growth lever.

Transcript

Meet Chris Johns And AdGood

SPEAKER_01 0:00

In 2025, donor behavior broke the assumptions most teams still used to plan. FundraiseUp's Pulse of the Donor 2026 gives you benchmark data on what changed and what to do next. Download the free report today at fundraiseup.com. Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Speer, joined today by Chris Johns, who is the founder and CEO of AdGood. If you joined us at Cos Camp this year, you may have met Chris uh as one of our exhibitors. It was great to have him around. And I'm excited to have him on the show today. Chris, welcome in.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Yeah, my pleasure. So tell the audience a little bit about yourself and kind of your background that brought us to the conversation today.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Yes, uh, so my name's Chris Johns. I am the CEO of AdGood. AdGood essentially is a 5123 nonprofit that turns unused streaming CTV inventory into affordable, targetable campaigns for nonprofits, giving this inventory at roughly a 70% off market rate. So that's really like a 4X return on the impressions for your budget.

What Connected TV Actually Is

SPEAKER_01 1:06

So good. So I think let's start the conversation there. Because I think sometimes when people hear CTV, I just want to let's just make sure we're all on the same page. Level set for us. What is that? Like, are we talking cable? Is that just internet? Help us understand what CTV is and what it is not.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Yeah, definitely. So CTB in itself is you know a multitude of different platforms, right? It's it's pretty much any sort of content delivered via internet to eat television in a home.

unknown 1:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

That can consist of free ad-supported television, like you would get through Samsung TV Plus, or it could be like VOD content that you're getting through a platform such as Tubi and things like that, or Plex, or any of these other scenarios. Uh, and there's multiple TV manufacturers, as I mentioned, Samsung, but like LG, TCL, and all these other manufacturers that actually have free ad-supported TV as well. And so this accumulates a whole bunch of different types of channels that they're typically used to getting through cable.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

So I think something that's interesting for a lot of folks to understand is that you know, typically when we would think about purchasing TV commercial spots, right? I am I'm gonna date myself a little bit, right? But I'm I am old enough to remember when we would have to go buy cable spots and you'd have to go to each network individually, and I would have to talk to the Fox affiliate and the NBC affiliate and the CBS affiliate here in Pittsburgh and work with each of those individually, which was a tedious process. And then I'd have to produce a commercial on top of it, and it was a whole to-do that I think was probably outside of the scope of what a lot of nonprofits thought they could handle. So tell me, help us understand how this is different.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

So it's different in the sense of what we really sought out to do with AdGood was really to simplify the whole process because no nonprofits getting media unless they know somebody. Because it's kind of like how do you get access to something when you don't know somebody that has that inventory? Uh, and you know, this is kind of what we saw in the bigger scenario. But to your point, like the difference between you know getting access to broadcast television versus CTV, it it's multiple fronts. A lot of it's the same because it's just managed service. You could just deliver your ad and somebody runs it for you, and then you get a report if you're lucky because it's donated media. And a lot of nonprofits are used to, when they get that type of donated media, it runs in the middle of the night. So we talk to a lot of nonprofits who are like, well, when's this running? And you know, part of our reporting is actually broken up by time of day, so you can see the impressions by time of day, so that you know your content's not just running in the middle of the night. But technically speaking, it's all the same great content you're used to getting on you know, broadcasts or on pay TV is the same content that you're getting in CTV and streaming. It's you know, your major players, ABC, NBC, AMC, scripts, you know, all these key things that you're used to seeing across the board, it's that same content. It's just delivered through streaming now.

Marketing Mindset And Better Nonprofit Creative

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Okay, so there's a conversation that you and I were having offline, and I I'm gonna dive back to it, which is I think that TV is a concept that still scares whether regardless of delivery system, that still scares nonprofits because talking about doing a big ad like that almost feels too corporate. There's some sort of and maybe you and I can just like break down this wall today and the nonprofit space will forever move on forward from it. But I feel like there has been over the years this kind of we're too good for marketing. Marketing is a dirty word, nonprofits don't do that. We don't wanna I don't know, there's something about um the approach of TV that feels too corporate for a local nonprofit to encounter, right? So I'm curious your thoughts on that. And and I'm assuming you're with me on this one of no no no, marketing is actually helpful. And if so, how do we think about what good content looks like instead of I think we're all familiar with some of the the sad puppy dog Sarah McLaughlin wailing in the background, right? That makes everybody kind of rolling.

SPEAKER_00 5:27

One of the most iconic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

Yeah, it's like the one that everybody talks about. So how do we make sure that we have content that is actually engaging and and catching people like that without being maybe over the top or too corporate with it?

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Well, you know, first off, on the marketing front, I don't think that nonprofits don't believe in marketing. I just think they're so busy with other things and so limited with budget that that's one of the pieces that fall off. And I think that that stands with just general smaller companies and SMBs in general. If you're not allocating and spending money to make money for donations or grow awareness and things like that, or more importantly, build your brand so that you can increase all those things across the board, then things don't grow. Like you're not growing your channels, you're not organically growing on a regular basis, you're not able to see what the performance can do for you over time, you're just limited. So I don't think it's uh an issue of want, it's just an issue of kind of their needs and they're some of them were just trying to stay alive, especially in these days. Uh, so on that front, I think that's kind of one of their key focuses. And on the other piece, you were mentioning creative. So on the creative front, yes, 100%. And you you made a great point, right? Like there's been amazing nonprofit ads that resonate even to this day where people still feel like that ad's running. Like it's like you can almost feel like they just saw that ad. And it really ties to the power of the message. And in some cases, too, the length of the creative, right? So, you know, we see interesting things around creative length where, you know, 30-second ads, you know, perform great, but we're seeing, you know, better uh cost per donor changes for these nonprofits and large increases in returns when the creative length comes into play. And I think that ties to the the point you were saying about the message, right? You gotta have your hook, you gotta really talk about what your cause is and what you're doing to affect that cause and you know what's happening in these communities or to these people and what you're doing to actually help benefit them and change their lives or help them address the issues that they're they're dealing with. And at the end of kind of saying what you do and how you do these things, you know, you got to have that closing piece of, you know, really just asking for donations that ties into that message and showing how people can support what you're doing and be a part of what you're doing. And, you know, that's all kind of brand messaging and impact messaging and all that good stuff. That there's, you know, there's a whole bunch of different great campaigns you can look at as benchmarks for that. Everybody knows the key wants to do. What are the what is the hierarchy for how that that whole story arc kind of occurs and when do they ask for the closing statements? Like there's there's examples of all of this already out there.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Is there someone out there nonprofit-wise that you think has kind of hit the nail on the head and is like, man, this is the gold standard for how to do this well?

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Well, I think yes, because I think there are, but some of them spend so much money that you really can't set that as a benchmark, a benchmark for any other nonprofit, right? Like you really can't. You should really benchmark yourself as a nonprofit before you start looking at other kind of people that are doing an amazing job. I can say that the more that these campaigns run and the nonprofits that do a better job of creating funnels to understand what their marketing funnel is, what's their donor funnel look like, and be able to constantly optimize, change creative when it's not performing, keeping a regular look at that stuff, really looking at key data points around like what your impressions look like, like how many times an ad was served, what was the frequency weight, how many times are people seeing an ad, what's the overall length of time that people are seeing the ad, like how many minutes are they are they seeing of this ad? And then how's it converting for you, right? How is the the the cost per donor allocation looking for that? And then being able to look at that entire piece and really just continually optimize it and grow it. I mean, if you're looking at at this as a marketing perspective, you can really turn marketing from a cost center to a profit center in a very easily and interesting way because I think all nonprofits know this. They need alternate revenue streams to be able to keep doing the good work that they're doing.

Tracking Donations With An Omnichannel Lens

SPEAKER_01 9:27

So good. So when we talk about though the how it's performing, what are your suggestions on tracking for that? I've seen orgs that just give out a phone number. I've seen ones that do a specific website for that commercial. I've seen some that do still do the QR code on screen that are trying to drive so that they're really driving. I know it came from this page. Is there one kind of mechanism that you see work best, or is it does it depend on the org and the market?

SPEAKER_00 9:58

So as with all marketing, you really got to think omni-channel with this stuff because you don't know, especially for us, right? TV. TV's not technical, at least not yet for nonprofits. I mean, maybe in some platforms, but there's some stuff coming later on that hopefully we'll be able to talk to you about. But for right now, it's you know, that's just not the scenario. So to be able to actually understand how they're performing, like, you know, we we see QR codes and we'll see scans from it, but then we also see gross and organic traffic because people are just plugging in the website. Additionally, too, they might be calling in, right? For in some scenarios for that where the creative actually has a phone number. Uh, and then there's other pieces where people are Google searching it when they see the ad because maybe they just caught the tail end of it, and so now they're searching for it. And then there's also, you know, you there's Google ad grants out there. So a lot of nonprofits are running paid ad words. And so these things are running out there, they're running ads all the time. There might be scenarios where um somebody sees an ad and then they see a Google AdWord that shows up. And so that all kind of ties into it. And there's also pieces too where people that have been to the website maybe didn't convert, we give a a tag that nonprofits can place on their website so that if you know, pretty much anybody that's visited your website, we're able to target and serve ads if they ever watch any of the channels that our content, our ads are available on. So if a nonprofit's running ads with us, they go to watch one of the channels that we have inventory on, they're actually seeing an ad good ad, hopefully to get them to return to the website and do all that good stuff as far as donations and whatnot. So there's, you know, there's a few different pieces to the puzzle. And I think you want to be omnichannel with that stuff, but obviously focus your spend where you're getting the greatest return. So, you know, AdWords and Meta do a great job. We hear this all the time from nonprofits. This is a big part of what their marketing campaigns are. But in some of the cases, they're really starting to see things level off. So it gets to a point where no matter how much spend they put in, the returns are kind of looking the same. So they're looking for alternate channels. And that's been a lot of, I think our organic search is like nonprofits looking for, you know, ways to get access to CTV. And we come up, and that's kind of one of the key pieces because we're one of the only platforms out there that are specific to only nonprofits. We're essentially doing all the great things that are existing in the advertising front for TV right now, uh, but we're doing it only for nonprofits.

The Origin Story Behind AdGood

SPEAKER_01 12:15

In 2025, donor behavior shifted across channels, devices, and giving frequency. FundraiseUp just released their 2026 Pulse of the Donor report that unpacks what happened. Your donation form is now your most valuable asset. Donors who trusted their experience gave more, gave again, and told others. Stop guessing what will work in 2026 and start using real data. Download FundraiseUp's free Pulse of the Donor report today at fundraiseup.com. Tell me how you started AdGood. What made you go, this is the thing, and or what is your experience that pushed you into that?

SPEAKER_00 13:07

Yeah, so you know, it really was just a simple thing, you know, sitting in an empty Red Cross blood drive, and I was the only donor in the room. And, you know, I'm looking around thinking this was a wasted capacity, it looks like, right? Like just at that exam exact moment, I knew that you know, there's there's billions of premium ad impressions that were just sitting unused on all these different streaming platforms. Some donated media existed, but nothing at scale and nothing truly built for nonprofits to be able to access at any point. So if they're running a campaign and it's and it's doing great, they're not able to add budget to it and really max out what their returns could be. And that's really when it hit me. It's like I could turn all this wasted capacity into fuel for causes, and nobody else was building this. So we had to.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

That's so cool.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

Yeah. I mean, I came from media and ad tech.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

So Okay, I was gonna say, what's where's your background that led you to because I have also been to blood drives or other events and thought, wow, there should be more people here, but I don't have the skill set or the background to have taken it in that direction.

AI Tools To Generate TV Ads

SPEAKER_00 14:04

Yeah, I mean, the donated media model hasn't changed in a hundred years. It's been the same, you know, since all this has been running like it's been the same model for years. And nothing existed for nonprofits where they could come in and do actual marketing and get the same great data, the same great access as all the major brands do for their multi-million dollar budgets, but on a nonprofit budget. There's nothing that exists in that same scenario. And if they didn't know a person, if they didn't have everything set up, if they just didn't have access, their budget's too low to be able to go into one of the big players and be able to run media. You know, that the minimum spend requirements are just too high for them. And so we wanted to create a scenario that accommodates all these different nonprofits, no matter how big they are. So, with that, we created, you know, a platform where we essentially go out and we get all kinds of donated media and we organize that media and we package it for them so they're able to connect to it programmatically. If they're a major nonprofit already spending, they can access our inventory at essentially 70% off market rates, what they're currently paying. And they can connect in the same scenarios that they're working, even if they're with an agency and they're running through one of the major demand side platforms. Um, that's more or less the trading desks where the agencies buy a lot of the media programmatically for connected TV. We can essentially set up deals right there. They can access it wherever they're currently buying and see the discounts hit immediately. Or we also do managed service where we manage everything for them. They just give us creative, we we give you the full audience package, we we allocate the budgets for all that stuff, and we set everything at a defined kind of piece for them. Uh and then the last piece, and this is the kicker, because you know, obviously, we have some minimums for the managed service for us, you know, where we need to get a certain level of you know budget for them. So we wanted to make sure that we hit all nonprofits of all sizes, even the tiny ones in really, really small, small towns doing doing great work, but like very limited on spend. And so we actually uh partnered with Streamer, which is a Gen AI ad manager. So we're able to actually allow even the smallest nonprofits that don't have ads to come in, access our ad manager where they can simply go in, put the URLs of the website in. The AI scrapes the content of their website and then generates a 30-second video ad with images, music, voiceover, script, all based on the contents that's that's there. Wow. And within that, it's all completely editable in a really simple UI. You can edit the copy, change the voiceover, change the music, you know, add logos, do all these key things right there within that tool, and then set your targeting. So if it's a really small campaign, you want to pick like, you know, five different zip codes, run just across those core zip codes for maybe an event that you have coming up, or if you're doing a donation drive, or if you're just trying to grow awareness to get people help, or you're trying to grow awareness to get donations. So there's all kinds of great things you could do. And then essentially you swipe a credit card, and honestly, for$250, you can run that's our minimum to be able to use that platform. And you can get your ads on TV across all of our great premium content within whatever set targeting and zip codes you have there. The whole process takes about four minutes.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 17:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

That is incredible. And I I it actually kind of circumvents what my next question was going to be, which was for orgs that don't have maybe somebody like they're not working with an agency, they don't have a marketing director. Yeah. Sometimes that creative can be the thing that holds them back. It might not even be budget, it might just be I don't have the stuff. But that sounds like an amazing solution.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

Yeah, and there's also great aspects to it too. You can do storyboards within that tool and create like the scenario for how you want your story arc to be as you get more used to kind of doing it and you want to push the creative limits a little bit more. There's tools in there to do that. You know, we have agency partners that utilize this as well. One of the other cool things too is it's it has Google VEO3 uh 3.2 integrated. So you're actually able to purchase Google credits and take static images and turn it into B-roll. So you can actually take images you do have and turn that into something that's usable for your ad.

Evergreen Awareness Versus Event Campaigns

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Wow. I'm curious your thoughts because you mentioned a couple different types in there. Yeah. When somebody's trying to get into this and add maybe add this to their current tool belt of marketing, do you recommend more of like a quick hitter, we're doing it for six weeks because we've got a golf outing coming up that we want to get people into?

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Or is it m better for the long play of building awareness and and staying in front of people to keep that kind of brand awareness going? Which one do you see work better for folks?

SPEAKER_00 18:30

Honestly, it's it's kind of a it's kind of both, right? So I think you have like your everging evergreen campaigns running, right? Okay. You always want to have that going. You want to build your awareness in the communities, you want to keep that notion going, always kind of asking for donations, really selling your cause. But also, too, when you start running for specific events, I think it kind of goes hand in hand. Like you want to talk about what you're doing, but you also want to push the event. So you might limit spend for your evergreen campaigns and then boost spend for your event, right? Because you want to direct to the event. And then it's kind of just awareness across the two. So that's a lot of what we see. And we see great success, you know, for the event piece specifically, like even for some of the most smaller nonprofits that we see. Um, you know, we just wrapped up a case study where one of the really small nonprofits saw like a 200 and something percent, 233%, I believe, uh return on spend for the amount of donations that they increased on. Well 400 plus percent return for attendees to their event. So they saw a massive return. And this was a very small community with not much viewership around, you know, the targeting that they had. And, you know, they performed really great. And they they're consistently using the ad manager for this. You know, there's reporting in there for them to see. They're generating all their ads with the tool. So it's, you know, it's pretty exciting.

How To Start With AdGood

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Yeah, that's great. Okay, so help us out if somebody has been listening to this and wants to learn more, wants to connect with adgood, wants to find out how to get started with you all, how what's the best way to do that?

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Yeah, you know, you can reach out at info at adgood.org or visit our website, adgood.org. Um, you know, there's a contact form on there as well. Um, but yeah, we're always happy to kind of you know talk to any nonprofit, you know, be able to access this. But more importantly, um, if you just want to dive in and start using the ad manager, you know, you can go in, create an account, and start, you know, essentially building an ad. Uh, the only time that you have to pay is if you go to buy the media and you have to swipe a credit card. So you can save those, you can share them, you can do all kinds of great things. You can also generate creative in there that you can also download uh for$250. And then you're able to use that creative anywhere you like. You own the rights. So you can use it across social. So there's tools for that as well there. And you can reach that that website at am.adgood.org. Um, it's also available through our website.

Doing Good At Scale

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Nice. I'm so curious, Chris. Given all of this and the work that you're doing, what's your favorite part as CEO? What are you most excited about?

SPEAKER_00 20:55

You know, I I think for us, it's the idea of doing good at scale. Like our whole thing is like we want to do good at scale as much as possible. Like we don't want to help just like a few kind of verticals of nonprofits by like 90%. Like we want to help all nonprofits across all categories by like 40%. Like that's our whole thing. We really want to take this idea of what marketing can do from converting from converting marketing from a cost center to a profit center for nonprofits, and then showing how, you know, by not just thinking about your media and your donation drives is like end of the year, but like doing it year-long and building brand and building all these key things so that we can show nonprofits how to grow to be the next tier. And then once they get to that next tier, they grow to be the next tier. Because the only way that the good work that they do is going to be sustained is if their businesses grow too and they have alternate revenue streams to continue the good work that they do. And it's a it's a very important piece, especially you know, with kind of what's happening in these days for nonprofits.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

Yeah. No, I think that's great. This has been super interesting, and I I think it's a Maybe a marketing channel that a lot of folks haven't felt like was for them. Yeah. Right? Maybe they thought they were too small or didn't have the right messaging, whatever. So I think it's I I hope it's been a good eye-opening piece for a lot of folks to realize that no, this is it is literally accessible for everybody to at least dip your toe in and really help to kind of broaden that scope of your current marketing plan.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

Yeah, exactly. And you know, we're just getting kicking up going here on marketing ourselves. You know, we do a lot of press and things like that. We run a lot of CTV media, but we're just starting to push the ad manager a little a lot more. So you'll definitely start seeing, you know, more of us in that space trying to push out to get to all the nonprofits. Because our our biggest problem isn't converting and showing what we do, it's literally just getting in front of the nonprofits because it's essentially it's it's kind of a no-brainer for a lot of what we're trying to do because our rates are so much lower than even what Facebook is. And they're getting the biggest screen in the home. Yeah. I mean, no better place to tell your story than on TV.

Must Read Book And Rapid Growth

SPEAKER_01 23:01

Agreed. It's great. Uh Chris, this has been super good. I do want to ask you one closing question as we wrap up today. Uh, so here on the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast, we have dubbed 2026 as the year of learning. So I have been asking everybody that's been on, what is one must-read that you would recommend people put on their to be read list? What's a book that either professionally or personally has really impacted you that you would absolutely recommend other people check out?

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Yeah, so one of the ones that I recently read was Social Startup Success. And it's uh it's around how the best nonprofits launch, scale, and make a difference by Kathleen Kelly. And that one I found to be really interesting because we kind of sit at this weird crossroad ourselves where we're a startup, but we're also like a nonprofit as well ourselves. And so we deal with you know all the different pain points because we have like technology that we're building, we have data components that we're working on and building. There's all kinds of business development on the streaming side with getting the inventory, and then there's like the operations and the management. So, in a lot of different ways, we're kind of riding this line between both of those. Um, and also we've had to grow really quickly. We only launched about a year ago. So I think you know, interesting enough, yeah, and we've grown incredibly. We're about three.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

I would not have guessed that given the amount of impact that you all have had so far.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

Yeah, we have about three billion available impressions monthly right now.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

That's crazy in only a year.

SPEAKER_00 24:32

Yeah, and you know, we work with uh so many nonprofits, you know, uh a lot of them direct, it's you know, but we also work with a lot of them indirectly through agencies and through a lot of the trading desks and platforms and supply side platforms and things like that. So there's a lot of that are indirect too that access our inventory. So I think total across the board is around 100, 120, something like that.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Wow, that's great. I can't wait to see what you all do in year two.

SPEAKER_00 24:56

Yeah, we're excited.

SPEAKER_01 24:57

I mean it's one heck of a year one.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

Yeah, it's just getting the word out and you know, trying to scale as much as we can. And you know, we have our own growing pains, right? Like it's uh things happen quickly over here, but you know, we just try to set things up appropriately so we can scale, and that's not the problem.

SPEAKER_01 25:13

Very good. I love it. Well, Chris, thanks so much for joining me. I really appreciate you kind of breaking this down for us so that our nonprofit audience can really start to understand CTV and what that looks like and how easy of an option it could be. It's great.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

And I'm happy to send over any links or whatever if you'd like, if it's easier for anybody to um get access to the ad manager through the comments or anything.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

Yeah, perfect. We'll stick those in the show notes. That'd be great.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 25:38

Well, Chris, thanks so much for joining me. Uh, this has been another episode of the Nonprofit Hub Radio podcast with my guest this week as Chris Johns, who's the CEO of Ad Good. We will go ahead and link those products that he was talking about in the show notes so you guys can go check those out. This has been another episode of Nonprofit Hub Radio. I'm your host, Megan Speer, and we'll see you next time.