Your website is falling down on the job.

When Alia and I started in this business 20+ years ago, most of our work was in digital. We oversaw many website redesigns, usually built around one question: How do we raise more money?

A couple of decades ago, people paid more attention to usability. Usability testing can be effective with as few as four participants, and it’s cost-effective. User experience is defined by what real people do when they visit your site, not by the UX consultant. Today the website feels like an afterthought. Social media gets the attention and the budget, and your site has become a commodity.

No one talks about shopping cart abandonment anymore. Fewer folks can answer the most basic questions about what visitors are looking for (which is often “boring stuff” like your phone number).

So imagine my delight when my favorite copywriter and all-around fundraising guru Tom Ahern did a ripped-from-the-pages-of-1999 piece on usability. It even includes a heat map showing where eyeballs land when your page loads. Remember heat maps? 

Tom cites a study from Nonprofit Tech for Good showing that 60-70% of home page visitors abandon the site within 10 or 15 seconds. He gives sage advice that shouldn’t need to be sage, like putting your newsletter signup at the top of your home page. He reminds us that most people don’t scroll, so anything below the scroll line is virtually invisible. And he shows examples of sites that get it and some that don’t.

Social media plays an important role in fundraising, but the investment in building your Instagram and TikTok presence may be out of proportion to the ROI. At some point, likes, follows, and reshares become vanity metrics.

So here’s my challenge: Take some of your TikTok money and bring four people who look like your target donors into the office. Sit them in front of a laptop and give them three tasks: (1) Make a donation (with a test card), (2) sign up for your newsletter, and (3) find your case for giving. Then watch. Don’t help. Don’t explain. Just take notes and squirm. Fix what you see, and I’d bet it pays off faster than your next viral reel.

Shiny is always more fun than tried and true. The problem is, to paraphrase Willie Sutton, tried and true is where the money is.