Vincent Flanders’ comments: Jakob Nielsen’s Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities is required reading for any nonprofit organization. His two big points (Mission Statements and accountability) ring true. As I’ve said a hundred times, no web site should have a mission statement — unless you’re a nonprofit and then you need to have the best mission statement possible. As I said in Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 organization names, mission statements, and tag lines shouldn’t say:

Big Hands of Hope

 – It’s all about compassion

They should say something like

Save the African Children

 – We keep them from dying a horrible death

Your mission statement, tagline, and organization name should tell me what you’re going to do.

Anyway, Jakob’s article is brilliant, etc. , except for one little detail. The math is wrong — or something is wrong as the illustration below demonstrates:

(If the above image is too hard to read, you can click the link below and scroll down toward the bottom.)

If you have a $10M budget and it increases 10%, that should be $1M not $100K. I think. I’m not great at math either.

Jakob’s about as good as math as I am, but he’s much cooler