SPN: 177. Your Design Process is Hindering Your Ability to Raise $$$

Plus, Smile Curves; the 5-Question landing page framework; and, plenty of Jobs & Opps

A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. You’ve joined a community of 4k+ marketing and fund raising operators at mission-driven Orgs. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.

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In this week’s SPN:

• 5 questions → design process → helping or hindering $$$

• Chart of the Week

• How to write a winning Brief

Let’s jump in.

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Chart of the Week

Retention curves like this are almost unheard of:

Smile curves for ChatGPT: Source

This chart commits what I call “y-axis crime” - the y-axis doesn’t start at zero. But in this case, the y-axis crime actually hurts ChatGPT! The curves are even better when you realize the worst cohorts asymptote (then “smile”) in the mid-40s.

These types of curves are typically reserved for marketplace or social products that have network effects, meaning they improve as more users join the platforms (e.g., Uber improving with more rider / driver density, or Instagram improving with more of your friends on the app).

Even putting my obsession with lifetime value aside, it’s wildly impressive to have this sort of retention for a “single-player” product that hasn’t launched social features (although they should imo).

All the more reason I enjoyed watching Dan Frommer speak at the recent BRXND event for data on how consumers are actually using AI, what they’re willing to pay for it, and the unexpected generational sentiment shifts.

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Reads From My Week 📚

Episode 322: Turning Cultural Trends into Career Momentum (Jesse Kirshbaum)

The Animation Industry Is Strapped For Cash, What’s Next? (Variety)

How Taylor Swift Rewrote The Business of Record Sales (WSJ)

Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Results Are Profound 💡 (New Yorker)

What if there were a universal ads API? (Brian O’Kelley)

‘Of Course It’s a Bubble’: AI Start-Up Valuations Soar in Investor Frenzy (FT)

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Ventures (404 Media)

Claude Skills Are Awesome, Maybe a Bigger Deal than MCP (Simon Willison)

Elf Cosmetics First to Test Twitch’s New Livestream Shopping Ads (MarketingDive)

The New World: Joshua Kushner, Thrive Capital, and The American Dream (Colossus)

Insights from Shopify’s 2025 Holiday Report (Shopify)

Orea-Maker Mondelez To Use New Generative AI Tool to Slash Marketing Costs (Reuters)

YouTube Paid out $8B to the Music Industry in the Last 12 Months (TechCrunch)

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How to Build an Efficient Design Process

For today’s longer post (which turned into a bit of a deep dive) I hope I can convince you of the NEED for sufficient design resources.

• Speed and Iteration

• Designers vs “Conversion Designers”

• Great Design Starts with a Great Brief

• Empower with Data

• The 5-Question Landing Page Framework

Whether you hire an agency, build a hybrid with internal/external resources, or hire all these roles internally, growing a nonprofit brand without a web/UX/UI design process is like having a Formula 1 car with no one to change the tyres or fill your gas tank during the race.

Great Design Starts with a Great Brief

Here’s an all-too-common scenario: an Org engages a freelance designer or agency, throws them a one-liner like “We need an on-brand landing page for our new program,” and then feels underwhelmed with the result. Garbage in, garbage out. A strong design process begins long before anyone opens Figma. It starts with the internal brief.

A good brief is not just a list of specs; it’s a transfer of inspiration and insight. Your team’s “secret sauce” lives inside your heads – the nuances of your Orgs brand voice, your donor psychology, what angle made that last campaign spike, the story that always gets folks excited. All that context needs to be distilled into the brief.

If your designer is spending half their day just chasing down context or clarifying vague briefs, the problem is your process.

You need better inputs. The brief should clearly state the goal, identify the target audience, describe the Match or program, outline the key messages to convey, and specify the desired action. If your brief could be swapped with any other brand’s and still make sense, it’s not specific enough. I like to include internal insights like:

• Positioning

• Donor insights

• Proven hooks

• Tone of voice/messaging parameters

A brief doesn’t need to be a novel, it needs to be clear.

If you tell a team “Make it cool,” that’s so vague it’s basically a Rorschach test – everyone will interpret “cool” differently. But if you say “We want to help busy parents feel more confident about their morning routine”, suddenly every creative decision falls into place. The designer knows the vibe. The copywriter knows to reassure and solve pain points.

A good brief narrows the problem and sparks the right solutions. If you’re working with external agencies or freelancers, this is even more important. They can’t read your mind. They don’t sit in your all-hands meetings and absorb your vision every day. You have to hand them the insight on a silver platter.

What’s your Orgs reason to exist? What’s the angle you keep nudging on internally? Tell them! A little extra effort upfront to write a thorough brief can save weeks of back-and-forth later. If your best designer is spending time clarifying vague briefs, that’s an operational failure, not a talent issue.

The Digital Shelf Is Won by Speed and Iteration

If we were in the business of traditional retail we’d be fighting for limited physical shelf space. Online, the “shelf” is infinite, and fiercely competitive.

Your mission and its respective programs aren’t sitting pretty in a store; it’s one of dozens of tabs on a donor’s browser. The Orgs that win are the ones that can test and iterate creative rapidly.

Why? Because each test = new learnings, and faster learnings = an edge in a market where donor attention is gold. There’s no store aisle here – your website is your storefront, and you can redesign that “storefront” as often as you want.

The faster you experiment, the faster you discover what resonates with donors (and what flops). The fastest way to validate a marketing hypothesis is to test it, but when creation takes weeks, testing becomes a luxury. We can’t afford that. Speed is the strategy.

This is about building a process that shrinks the cycle time from idea to execution. In a fast-moving digital fundraising landscape, being responsive in real-time can make or break your monthly CPA or pacing. If the need arises on Tuesday to create a Veteran’s Day bundle, I want a live landing page by Wednesday, not next Friday. If an A/B test on a mission page shows variant B with a program comparison chart module converts 20% better, I want to roll that out across the site ASAP. Agility wins on the digital shelf and comes from a process that enables rapid testing and iteration.

A faster design process doesn’t mean more chaos; it means more control. With defined templates, reusable components, and a shared design system, your donor experience becomes both faster and more consistent.

Designers vs “Conversion Designers”

One huge bottleneck I’ve experienced first-hand: most Orgs hire “designers” but not “conversion designers.” What’s the difference?

A designer might make things look beautiful. A conversion-focused designer makes them sell. This isn’t a knock on designers at all, it’s a call to empower them (through data) with a conversion mindset.

Outside the growth world, people think a designer is a designer. Conversion designers blend visual design, UX, and CRO (conversion rate optimization) skills. They’re trained to ask: “Does this layout direct the donor’s eye to the right message and call-to-action? Does the page address the donor’s psychological triggers and concerns?” These folks live at the intersection of art and science, making pages aesthetic and persuasive.

Many Orgs inadvertently create a bottleneck by expecting a single graphic designer also to be a master of UX, analytics, and persuasive copy. It’s like expecting your general practitioner to also be a cardiologist and a neurosurgeon.

The solve? You need that conversion specialization. If you don’t have it in-house, consider training your team or bringing on a consultant who thinks in terms of hypotheses, user research, and A/B testing. Once a page is live, it’s an ongoing optimization process: learning from donor feedback, coming up with new hypotheses, and testing.

The Orgs that treat design as part of growth (not a siloed “creative” project) are leaping ahead.

And if you lead a design team, here’s a pro-tip I’ve learned from experience: good design isn’t a solo act. Pair your designers with your marketers, web analysts, and copywriters. Form little conversion squads. When a designer can riff with a marketer on “What if we move the form higher because our scroll map shows 80% of visitors never see our CTA to subscribe?” that’s the magic combo of aesthetics + analytics in action.

Share the Secret Sauce: Empower Creators with Data

I worked with a large Org this year that was struggling with its landing page results. They had great designers and even copywriters involved. The pages looked beautiful and on-brand, but performance was meh. When I dug in I found the creative team was flying blind. The marketers were running Facebook ads to these pages and hoarding all the data on the backend, while the designers got just superficial feedback like “It’s not working, can we try a different hero image?”

This is way more common than you’d think. Creators, the designers, copywriters, video editors, and maybe even developers, should have direct access to performance insights to build intuition. If you have the time, I recommend walking them through it, too.

If your designers and writers can’t rattle off your last landing page’s conversion rate, or haven’t seen a heatmap of how users scroll that page – that’s a missed opportunity. How can we expect them to iterate intelligently if we don’t close the feedback loop?

One of my wins at UNICEF was ensuring we had our creative folks swim in the same data as our digital marketing folks. We’d literally show designers the heatmap recordings or user-session recordings from a page they designed, so they can see “oh wow, nobody is scrolling past the first section, maybe our intro isn’t compelling enough” or “people are rage-clicking this non-clickable element; it looks like a button”.

When creators see real user behavior, it’s like a lightbulb moment every time. They start designing with those learnings in mind, which means each version gets better. It shortens the feedback loop dramatically. Your internal data is part of your secret sauce. Share it (and ideally with your own insights layered on top). That means giving creators access to:

• Analytics/dashboards (how is that page converting, where’s the drop-off in the donor funnel?)

• A/B test results (what variations have you tried and what were the outcomes?)

• Donor feedback (donor support tickets or survey responses)

• Session recordings and heatmaps (where do they scroll, where do they pause, where do they bounce?)

One of the biggest wins we had was when a copywriter on our team started sitting in on bi-weekly performance review calls.

She’d hear things like “Version X of the landing page beat Version Y with a +22% digital revenue lift” and, more importantly, why we thought that happened. Her copy drafts started pre-empting the issues we usually caught later, because she had developed a nose for what works by absorbing the data. This is what I mean by building intuition. When creators internalize the metrics, they start making micro-decisions that move the needle, without always being explicitly told.

Data informs creativity; it doesn’t replace it. Your team’s gut feelings and bold ideas still lead the way, but now you’re validating and refining them with evidence.

Test, Learn, Repeat… or leave performance on the table

If you’re not testing new landing pages or page variations on a monthly or quarterly basis, you’re almost certainly leaving money (or at least performance upside) on the table. “Set it and forget it” is not a strategy on the digital shelf. Yet I see so many Orgs launch a single landing page and then just drive all traffic there for months.

One practical tip: duplicate and modify. If you have a landing page that’s performing decently, use it as a base to test a new angle rather than starting blank. Duplicate landing pages and test new angles constantly.

Testing isn’t only about big, dramatic redesigns. Some of my best lifts have come from seemingly minor changes e.g. adding the extra line “Your gift makes an impact today - not someday.” It mirrors the shipping speed + trust guarantee vibes that ecommerce uses with their “Free 2-day shipping + hassle-free returns” messaging.

The 5-Question Landing Page Framework

One framework I swear by is making sure any landing page answers 5 key questions that every donor subconsciously asks. If you’ve been around my content, you’ve probably heard me harp on these.

Different people phrase them differently, but here’s my take:

1. What is the mission? Don’t assume the visitor magically knows. Tell them in clear, simple terms. A confused visitor never converts.

2. Why do you exist? What are you solving for? Answer, “Why does this Org deserve to exist?” at every touchpoint.

3. How will it make me feel being part of something meaningful? Arguably the most important. This is where a nonprofit’s “benefit” becomes emotional, not transactional. Donors may not get something in return but they feel something. A sense of agency, impact, connection, or relief that their action matters.

   Your page should answer the donor’s subconscious question:

   “If I give, what change will I create and how will that make me feel?”

   Spell it out:

   • “Your gift provides 3 days of clean water to a family in need.”

   • “You’ll help one child get lifesaving treatment this week.”

   • “You’ll join thousands of supporters rebuilding homes for veterans.”

   • “You’ll stand with survivors and show them they’re not alone.”

   Those are benefits framed as impact: clear, immediate, and emotional. The key is to connect the donor’s action to a tangible outcome, and that outcome to a personal emotional reward. Because at every second, the visitor is subconsciously asking:

   “Will this act make me feel like a difference-maker?”

   If your page doesn’t quickly answer that - through visuals, copy, or stories - they’re gone.

4. How fast does my donation get distributed? This is the logistics/immediacy question, and it matters more than Orgs realize. In a world trained by Amazon Prime, people do wonder: “If I hit buy, when will this arrive?” Address it upfront: “we put your generous donation to work where the need is greatest effective immediately, and we will keep you up to date on our programs every… week/month/second Tuesday.”

5. Why should I trust this brand? Last but definitely not least, build trust. New visitors are naturally skeptical. So your page must answer, “How do I know you’re legit and confirm that where you say my money goes it does?” This is where social proof and credibility markers come in. Include things like:

• Donor reviews / testimonials

• Press logos / influencer endorsements

• Trust badges (Charity Navigator stars, secure checkout icon, etc.).

• Awards

• Transparent details

Trust elements should be woven through the page: a review snippet near the top, a dedicated section with testimonials or logos, etc.

Final Thoughts: Design Process as a Competitive Moat

I’ll close with this: in fundraising, your ability to test and iterate quickly on design and creative is one of the few sustainable advantages you have.

When you foster a culture that’s always learning from the donor, always pushing out new experiments, and rapidly doubling down on what works, you create a virtuous cycle.

Each week you’re a little smarter and a little better than last week. Do that for 52 weeks and you’re playing a different ballgame than a peer Org who refreshes their site once a quarter.

In an environment with no physical shelves and essentially infinite competition for donor attention, the brand that learns fastest wins. The machine that turns ideas into learnings is your design and creative process. So invest in it. Audit it. Fix the leaks in it. Hire not just great designers, but enable them to be great conversion designers. Hand them great briefs infused with the donor insights only you have. Feed them the data to sharpen their intuition. And give them a workflow that lets them go from idea to live test in days, not weeks. Do this, and you’ll not only see better metrics, you’ll feel a change in your team and drive more fundraising dollars as a result.

There’s an excitement when the creative folks and growth folks are in lockstep, pumping out winners. It’s that feeling of momentum!

That’s all for today.

I hope you’ve found one nugget today that you can put into play next week.

If you enjoyed this SPN, please consider sharing with your network. Thank you to those that do.

If a friend sent this to you, get the next edition of SPN by signing up below.

And huge thanks to this Quarter’s sponsor Fundraise Up for creating a new standard for donor experience that ensures Orgs raise more money.

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Jobs & Opps 🛠️

International Planned Parenthood Federation: Global Head of Individual Philanthropy ($160,000 - $170,000)

National MS Society: Director, Email ($95,000 - $110,000)

Educators for Excellence: Executive Director ($213,000 - $249,000)

IRC: Director, Strategic Initiatives & Delivery ($70,000 - $145,000)

The Rockefeller Foundation: Manager, Innovation ($157,000 - $181,000)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Deputy Chief Officer for Patrons ($125,000 - $150,000)

The Breast Cancer Research Foundation: Director, Foundation Relations (Institutional Giving) ($140,000 - $155,000)

Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Bay Area: Vice President, Development & Advancement

Teach for America: Managing Director, Development

Fundraise Up: Chief of Staff, Marketing/Director of MarOps