Your Nonprofit’s Best Link Only Goes One Way

For five months, the website box on my own Instagram profile pointed at a client’s site.

I build nonprofit websites for a living, which makes it worse.

I’d swapped it in on a Tuesday to test something, told myself I’d put it back after lunch, and then didn’t think about it again until the leaves changed. Anyone who found me there and tapped the link met a florist.

Nobody said a word to me about it. Nobody ever does.

So I run the check below on myself twice a year now, out of pure embarrassment, and it takes about five minutes. Run it as you read, not later, because later is where checks like this go to die.

Why I’m asking your sector in particular

On 77.9% of the nonprofit websites I audited, a visitor can reach at least one profile the organization runs itself, and ranking every sector on that one check drops nonprofits at 4 of 47.

Nothing else these sites do finishes anywhere near that high, which is worth saying out loud to a board that has convinced itself its website is a national embarrassment.

The number across my whole sample is 66%, which tells you how many plumbers and accountants would rather not admit in public that they have an Instagram.

Your sector doesn’t have that option. A charity lives on people knowing it’s still alive this month, and a photo of Saturday’s build says that faster than any paragraph on your homepage.

But a link pointing out of your site is half a handshake. The other half is whether the profile at the far end points back, and I have never once checked that.

So you’ll have to.

The check, five minutes, starting now

Do it on a computer if one is nearby, since on a phone the settings you want hide behind three taps and a menu.

Open your homepage and scroll all the way to the bottom. Write down every profile it links to.
Open each of those profiles in its own tab. Don’t click around inside them yet.
On each profile, find the website box near the top. Is your address in it, and is it your current address?
Tap your own link from inside the profile. Where did you land: your homepage, or something that used to be your homepage?
Read the name on each profile out loud, then read the name on your website. Same name?

Five tabs, five minutes, and you know something about your own organization that no report has ever told you.

Then count the clean ones, and be strict. An empty website box doesn’t count, and neither does an address that bounces through two old domains before it settles anywhere.

How many of yours survived? Three of my four did the last time I sat down with it, and websites are the job I get paid for.

What I usually find when I do this for a client

Four things, in order of how often they turn up.

The website box is empty on the oldest profile, the one a volunteer set up before anybody had a plan.
The address in the box has a question mark and a run of letters bolted onto the end of it, a tag some tools add so they can count clicks, and it works fine right up until the day the tool gets cancelled.
The link points at the site from before the rebuild, which now belongs to a domain squatter selling car insurance.
The profile carries your registered charity name, and your website carries the name people actually call you. A donor gets the two and has to guess.

Any of those turn your best habit into a hallway with a locked door at the end of it. I once opened a law firm homepage that pointed nowhere at all, which is this same fault with the volume turned up.

Who walks it backwards

You’ve been picturing this the wrong way round, and so was I for years.

I build websites, so I picture a stranger landing on your homepage and heading out to your profiles from there. Plenty of them do exactly that.

Someone always tells me nobody taps those icons. Indianapolis links them harder than most cities I ranked, and I have yet to hear a donor complain about being handed too many ways in.

But more of them arrive the other way: a friend shares your fundraiser, a photo gets reposted, someone leaves a comment about a Saturday shift and a stranger taps the profile name to find out who these people are.

She’s on your profile. She wants the donate page, or the volunteer form, or just proof you’re a real organization with a real address.

If the website box is empty, her journey ends on a photograph of a barbecue.

Does she go and search your name again from scratch? Some will. She had her wallet out. Then she meets the grey line under your name in the results, which happens to be the one sentence nobody at a nonprofit volunteers to write.

Donors are also suspicious, and they should be, because there are a lot of fake fundraisers in the world. A profile that points at a real website with a real address on it is the cheapest proof of life you own.

Two caveats on my own number

Two things you should know before you lean on my figure, and the first one is the size of the pile it came off.

That share sits on 2,912 nonprofit websites I could open and read, and if you’d sooner see it for yourself than take my word for it, choose Nonprofits from the industry menu in my report’s explorer, leave the city menu alone on all cities, and the card that lands underneath shows each check with the number of sites it ran on.

The second caveat is where my number goes soft, and skipping it would bother me all week.

My check is a yes or a no. It sees a link leaving your page for a profile and it writes down yes, and it has no idea whether anyone has posted there since the last election.

So the real state of your sector is worse than 77.9%, and the gap between the two is exactly the walk I’ve just asked you to take.

The habit underneath the habit

Your sector points outward well because your sector talks. 47.0% of these sites publish a blog, well clear of what I find in trades that spend real money on marketing.

Someone in your building already writes the newsletter, posts the photograph on a Sunday evening and thanks the volunteers individually, and that person understands your accounts better than any agency ever will.

That person is the right person to hand this check to. Not your web designer, who has no way of knowing which account you actually use and which one has been dormant since a summer student made it.

It belongs with the rest of the small jobs a live website needs someone to own, the ones that never appear on a quote.

When a nonprofit hires me for a new site, the first hour goes on a list like the one above. It’s the least impressive hour of the whole job and it fixes more than the next ten.

Send me your page

Run your five tabs tonight. How many pointed back? Was your name the same on both ends of every link?

If one of them lands on car insurance, I’d love to hear about it, because I collect those and mine was a florist.

And if you’d rather I did the walking, send me your homepage address and I’ll open every profile it points at, then tell you which ones are quietly sending your donors nowhere. The walk costs me ten minutes, and if all of yours turn out healthy I’ll say so and send you off happy, which happens in your sector more often than in any other one I check.