The One Sentence Nobody at a Nonprofit Volunteers For
Nonprofit websites are written by people who care about words. Then 61.0% of them fill in the line a search result prints under their name, which is last of the 47 industries I audit.
Last week I spent four evenings opening nonprofit websites, one tab at a time, writing down what each one had and what it didn’t.
Food banks. Two hospice societies, an animal rescue, a family literacy program, and a youth orchestra with a better logo than most agencies could draw.
Paying clients get the identical run in the identical order, because I stop trusting my own eyes the moment I start hopping around the list.
Is there a site. Has anyone said anything on it lately. How does it behave on a phone.
What’s in the code. What happens to a stranger who decides to help.
Two of those stops stopped me. Only one of the two was a nice surprise.
Is there anything to click?
My first check has nothing to do with design. It asks whether a Google listing hands a person a website at all, because a charity a donor can’t reach has a bigger problem than the one I get paid to fix.
If a donor can’t get from your listing to your page, nothing else on my list is worth the ink.
88.8% of the nonprofits I sampled list one, a fair way ahead of the 83% I find across all the businesses I audited, and I had that the wrong way round in my head before I ran it.
My theory was that a charity spends its last dollar on the thing it exists to do, and the website waits another year.
Boards don’t work like that. A website is the one project a volunteer board can agree on in a single meeting, and there’s usually a member whose daughter builds them.
Yours probably went up that way, and it’s probably fine. A food rescue homepage I pulled apart last year had eleven plugins on it and one donate button, and the software was never what was hurting it.
Has anyone said anything on it this year?
Your sector writes, and it isn’t close. 47.0% of the sites I audited publish a blog, a long way clear of the 37% I find everywhere else.
Your posts are good, too. Someone who was in the room writes them, which beats anything I could produce about a coat drive I never attended.
It means you skip most of the mistakes that make a small business blog unreadable, because nobody writing yours is trying to sound like a company.
That habit comes free with the work. A truck turns up on a Tuesday, someone takes a photo, and the photo already has a story stuck to it before a word gets typed.
When did your site last mention something that happened this month?
The phone
Two different checks sit at this stop, and almost nobody I talk to keeps them apart.
The first asks whether your page fits a phone screen at all. 78.1% of these sites clear it, which is the dullest line in the whole nonprofit audit, since that’s about what everybody gets.
The second asks how long your page takes to arrive on a middling handset over a poor connection, which resembles a donor on a bus a lot more closely than the wifi in your office does. Your sector gives up ground on that one, and the ground is invisible from inside the building.
Nobody writes in to say your website was slow. They leave, and you never learn their name.
The lock
Then I type your web address the lazy way, no s on the front, and watch what the browser makes of it.
Your sector is tidier here than most: 89.8% of these sites carry that lazy visitor over to the locked version, against 88% across everything I audit.
When it’s missing, a donor who typed your address off a poster lands on the unlocked version, gets a warning in red from her browser, and decides on the spot that a charity site is a peculiar place to be typing a card number.
Would your own address survive being typed by hand off the back of a flyer?
The code
Nobody ever fights me on this part. It takes the longest and no one has ever cared about a tag the way they care about a logo.
In 2019 a woman who ran a family literacy program called me the night before her big fundraiser, upset about something she’d just seen.
She’d searched her own charity from her sister’s phone, and the result carried a line under her name that she didn’t recognize.
Skip to content. Donate. Volunteer. Menu.
Nobody had ever written the sentence that belongs in that spot, so Google went hunting through her page for something to put there, and the top of her menu is what it grabbed.
She had forty pages of careful writing on that site. The one line a stranger reads before deciding anything was assembled by a machine that had no idea what she did all day.
Of the sites I opened last week, 61.0% had that sentence written, and I re-ran it twice, because everywhere else I audit it comes out at 77.9% and I assumed I’d broken my own script.
I hadn’t. So a sector full of people who write for a living, and one that lands 47 of 47 once I rank every trade on that check, is leaving blank the single line that gets read more often than the annual report ever will.
Why would that be? My guess is that it doesn’t feel like writing to the people doing the writing.
It’s a box on a settings screen, three clicks away from anything anyone would call content, and no volunteer has ever been handed it as a job. How many people in your office know it exists?
Nobody quotes for that sentence either. A cheap website quote buys every part a machine can install and stops at the exact point where a human being has to sit down and think.
The photos underneath
Same section of my audit, one stop later.
A hospice thrift shop I look after had two hundred photographs of donated furniture on its website, and not one of them carried a written description.
Their best volunteer is a retired teacher who lost most of her sight four years ago. That page read out to her as image, image, image, image.
Every photograph on that page had an empty alt text box sitting behind it, and filling one in takes about as long as saying out loud what’s in the shot.
The average nonprofit site describes 49.4% of its images, and everything it skips is silence to a woman like her.
Your gallery gets the least attention on your whole site and it holds the most work in it. Would yours say anything at all to the people you serve, or to a donor searching for pictures of what her money bought?
What happens when someone wants in
Last stop. I read the page the way a person with a free Saturday and a bit of guilt would read it.
She’s already decided. She wants to give you four hours a week, or a hundred dollars, or a trunk full of canned soup.
On 19.2% of these homepages she gets a box to type into, a good bit under the 28% I find across every business I audit, and none of those businesses are trying to recruit anybody.
Everywhere else she has to find an address, copy it, open her mail app and write to a stranger from a blank screen. Some will. Most were only ever going to do the easy version of this.
Every nonprofit site I build launches with the form on the first screen and two people on the email it sends to, because one inbox is a vacation away from a lost volunteer.
Adding the ten checks up
Run all ten checks, weighted the way my scoring weights them, and nonprofits finish on 72 out of 100.
Middle of the pack, and a strange shape underneath that number.
The parts a person writes are strong. The parts a machine reads are where the sector leaks, and in most trades I audit it runs the other way: the tags get filled in by the software and the writing is a slogan someone bought in 2014.
So nothing in this sector is broken. Two or three habits are missing, and not one of them costs a dollar.
An owner in another trade emailed me about ranking while her designer pushed twelve blog posts at her, and the fix was one line at the top of her homepage. More writing is rarely the answer for people who already write.
Go and read your own line
Search your own name tonight, on someone else’s phone, the way your donor would.
Read whatever sits under the link. Did a person write that sentence, or did a machine go rummaging through your homepage and pick out the first thing it found?
And if it was the machine, who in your building would you trust to write it properly? I’m not answering that one for you. It’s the only question in my whole audit that nobody outside your office can answer.
