Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, a little behind-the-scenes on a project I bid on and really hoped to win, and didn't win 😕

And read down to the end if you're following the story about GoFundMe and others platforms spinning up unauthorized donation pages. There's an actual lawsuit now.

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How losing a project sparked new ideas

A little behind-the-scenes on my business today, and on an ultimately-failed project bid that helped give me some clarity about a type of work I'd love to find more of!

Through a mutual connection, I had the opportunity to submit a proposal for a project that involved building a really cool interactive map and database tool for one of the leading pro-democracy nonprofits here in the US.

I spent a good amount of time nerding out on how I'd build the solution, and put together a really solid proposal. It involved:

• An interactive heatmap of all US counties, with toggles to choose which data points to display
• Pop-up windows triggered on click to show county-specific data
• All the standard map controls: pan, zoom, etc.
• An information panel beneath the map showing even more detail about the selected county, with dynamic data pulling from a WordPress custom post type
• County search, with type-ahead predictive functionality

In any competitive bidding situation, of course there's a chance that you don't get picked. And that's what happened here. I lost out because my business isn't an agency, and I don't have a whole team of developers to deploy on a project.

That's ok: it's happened before and it will happen again, most likely.

What I learned

Putting this proposal together gave me a chance to scratch an itch to do more mapping work.

I'm a map nerd ... before getting into the work I do now, I spent almost a decade in higher education, ending up with a PhD in Geography. Lots of thinking about place and space, and the power that maps have to define how we think about the world, and how we interact with it.

I'm coming away from this experience want to find more opportunities to help nonprofits tell stories and connect with supporters using maps and data visualization.

A carefully designed map can help your nonprofit tell a story, perhaps a story of impact, illustrating the geographic breadth of your work.

A carefully designed map can help your nonprofit engage your target audience, allowing users to drill down into the impact your issue has on their local community.

And in the most simple use case, a carefully designed map can help users find your services, like for a healthcare system whose website I'm working on this week.

If this sparks an idea about how you could tell the story of your work with maps and data visualization, get in touch!!

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Alaska sues GoFundMe and others for creating donation pages without consent

Another update in the ongoing story about the practice of using public nonprofit org data to set up donation pages without asking for consent.

GoFundMe caught a lot of attention for doing this back in 2025 (I wrote about that here), and last week I shared about a letter from 21 state AGs and regulators who are clearly interested in cracking down on this practice.

Now, the state of Alaska has filed a lawsuit against GoFundMe, Pay Pal Inc., Charity Navigator, Just Giving, Pledge and Network for Good, accusing them of using publicly available data to generate fundraising pages for more than one million nonprofits and then soliciting donations through those pages without first obtaining permission from the charities.

Read more coverage in The Nonprofit Times.

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Do you have a website project coming up this year that you want to discuss?

I offer free consultations for nonprofit org staff considering a website rebuild or redesign, or who need help answering questions like these.

I'm currently booking new projects to start in June and beyond.

If you want to chat, use this link to find a time for us to talk.

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