Hi friends 👋🏻

A quick, thought-provoker this week, based on a recent client success! What role does your website play as your organization tries to secure new funding or major gifts?

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"Our Letter of Inquiry was limited to 1,500 characters!"

A client recently got the opportunity to write a Letter of Inquiry (LOI) to a major foundation here in the US — the first step in potentially being awarded a huge multi-year grant from a funder that is typically invite-only.

Getting the chance to submit an LOI was big news, but they were told it had to be 1,500 characters or less. Not words. Characters.

We're only a few short paragraphs into this email and we're already over 750 characters ...

Where else will the funder look?

A 1,500 character LOI is barely any information. Not enough to determine whether to move a funding prospect forward in this foundation's pipeline.

So when I heard this story, the first thought that crossed my mind was where else the Program Officer would look for information?

If the LOI did its job, the Program Officer's interest would be piqued, and my bet is that they would do some combination of:

• Google the organization name
• Look at the website homepage
• Perhaps look up the CEO or ED on LinkedIn

What might they be looking for?

I'm not a funder, so I can only speculate. But I know that if I were writing that super-short LOI, there's all kinds of other supporting evidence I would have been desperate to include: content about program impact, case studies, details of their approach, experienced team members bios, and so much more.

After the client hit send on that LOI, they were relying on that Google search, the quick website visit, and perhaps some clicking around on LinkedIn to surface all that other information that didn't make the character count cut.

The importance of managing your digital presence

This short anecdote is one of hundreds I could share that all underscore how important it is for nonprofit organizations to manage their digital presence.

At the center of your digital presence is your website. And when a potential funder (or major donor, or small dollar donor) lands there, considering you for support, you need to make sure they can quickly find what they're looking for.

Show them:

• What you do
• How you do it
• Why
• The impact you've already made
• The impact you could make with more support
• Social proof that demonstrates that you already have a community that supports your work

Of course your website needs to speak to other audiences too, not just potential donors or funders. But for the purposes of this story, it was important that the Program Officer receiving that LOI could find all these things on the organization website.

And beyond the website, there are other critical components to manage:

• What shows up when you Google your organization
• What ChatGPT and other LLM tools have to say about your organization
• Your social media presence, and that of your leadership team
• Your earned media footprint

If this feels relevant to your organization (or for client organizations if you're a consultant), the starting point is a quick audit that you can do yourself.

Think about everything you would want a potential donor or foundation program officer to know if you could do an unlimited brain dump (which of course you will never get the chance to do).

Then slim it down to the most important content. Make a list.

Now pretend you're that program officer or donor.

Search for your org's name. Look up your CEO on LinkedIn.

Are you easily finding those things you want them to find?

If not, it's time to strategize: what will you do to create that digital presence? If you need help at this stage, reach out and I'll see if I can help (or recommend someone who can!)

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