Your Checkout Is the Funnel’s Fatal Flaw
You can have the most beautiful website in the world. You can have perfect information architecture. Your ticketing system works flawlessly. But if the moment someone decides to give you money is clunky, onerous, or confusing, you've just thrown away the most valuable part of the funnel. I've worked with charities, nonprofits, and ecommerce sites for thirty years. The single biggest weakness is almost always the last step. The checkout. The donation form. The moment of commitment. It's usually because everyone focuses on getting people to that moment. How do we drive traffic? How do we build awareness? How do we get them interested? Nobody's thinking about what happens in those final five seconds when someone's about to spend money. A nonprofit I was just talking to has a system that can't even handle a basic corporate bulk purchase correctly. Goldman Sachs wants to buy thirty thousand dollars worth of tickets. The system falls apart. You can print them, sure, but digitally? It doesn't work. That's money sitting on the table. If you're redesigning a website and you're not spending serious time on the donation or purchase flow, you're missing the whole point. #Conversion #Nonprofit #UX
Treat Unpaid AI Tools as Noise, Prioritize Billable Work
Trying to work out how to stay current with AI developments without letting them completely derail actual project work. Some days I'm spending more time clicking links to the latest tool than actually doing billable things that move client work...
Audits Expose Issues; Organizational Inertia Blocks Change
A client brought me in for a fundraising review. First thing I did was look at their 2024 donation funnel audit. It identified every problem. All of them. Data-backed, specific, comprehensive. I asked how many of those changes had been implemented. One. One...
Removing Guilt Can Spark Unexpected Productivity
Trying to work out whether the guilt I feel about not working is doing anything useful. There's a version of pressure that works. A client deadline, a bank balance that looks a bit too sparse, the specific dread of a task...
Incentives, Not Policies, Drive Process Bypass
Someone figured out that if they cc the right person on a request, it jumps to the front of the queue. Within weeks, everyone in the organization knows the shortcut. I see this in a lot of in-house teams. The intake...
Disorganization Persists Until Pain Forces Systemic Change
Being organized is not a personality trait. It is a response to sufficient pain. I spent years assuming that people who managed their commitments without dropping things were just wired differently. Then in 2010 I hit a wall. Too many projects...
Fast AI Demos Mask Deep Clinical Production Challenges
AI tools have made it genuinely easy to build things that look finished before they are. That is mostly brilliant, and occasionally a problem. The prototype speed is real. The production complexity is also real. The job, more and more,...
Score Backlog Items to Turn Chaos Into Clear Priorities
A backlog is not a list of good ideas. It's a list of things you haven't said no to yet. The distinction matters because most backlogs grow faster than they're worked through, and nobody has a principled way to decide what...
Funding Projects Leaves Products Perpetually Half‑Finished
Project funding is how large organizations control their budgets. It is also, rather inconveniently, how they ensure their digital products stay permanently half-finished. The mechanics of it are almost elegant in a depressing sort of way. A project gets funded, a...
Predictable AI Openings Undermine Content Credibility
I got some feedback recently that made me stop and think. Someone told me they could tell my LinkedIn posts were AI-generated before they finished the first sentence, and the giveaway wasn't the content, it was the opening. Always "last...
Speak Execs' Language: Frame UX as Retention, Cost, Risk
Executives don't care about users. That sounds harsh, but it's just accurate. They care about retention, acquisition, cost reduction, and compliance risk. Those are the things they're measured on. 'Users' is an abstraction that doesn't map to any of those. The...
The Real Challenge of Tech Shifts: Unlearning Habits
I spent longer than I'd like to admit still thinking in CSS float layouts after Flexbox arrived. Not because I couldn't learn Flexbox. Because I'd gotten fast and confident with the old approach, and fast and confident is genuinely hard...
AI Success Depends on Organized, Conductor‑Style Workflows
I was working through my newsletter this week and realised there's a problem nobody's really talking about with AI adoption. Everyone's focused on which tools to use. Nobody's talking about the fact that most people aren't organized enough to actually use...
AI Features Need Real User Problems, Not Hype
'Can you put some AI in it?' Someone writes that in a brief and everyone nods along like it constitutes a requirement. AI as a feature request with no user need attached is the new version of 'can we make the...
Schedule Rest Like a Client Commitment, Not a Nice‑to‑Have
I've been trying to work out why "protect your recovery time" is advice everyone agrees with and nobody actually follows. I've had this conversation more times than I can count. Someone admits they've been working through evenings and weekends for weeks....