They Published One Price and Refused to Publish the Other

There is a page on donandpatti.com right now asking people for money. I built the site.

Let me show you the part of that page that has nothing to do with missions and everything to do with running a business.

It publishes one price down to the dollar.

It refuses to publish the other one.

The setup

The page is a campaign for a water well and a maize mill in Malawi. Two needs, one page, one ask.

The first need carries a number. $7,630 for the bore hole, in US dollars, taken off the actual bid. The page states it and attributes it to Don Nichols in his own written words.

The second need also has a number. Don published it himself. He posted the maize mill's price.

The page will not repeat it.

Here is what sits in the spot where a price would normally go: Don published the maize mill's cost in US dollars as a photograph with his post. This page repeats only figures he has written out.

Read that again.

They had the number. It was in hand. They would not put it on the page, because the copy they had was a picture, and a picture is not a source anybody can check.

Why a number in a picture is a different animal

A figure written in text can be searched, quoted, and checked back against the bid it came from. A figure inside a photograph cannot. Nobody can verify it without your help, and you will not always be standing there to help.

There is a second problem, and most businesses never think about it once.

The moment you type a number out of somebody else's picture onto your own page, you become the source. Drop one digit and that is now your error, with your name on it, on your domain, inside your ask. The man who actually published the figure has no idea it is out there wrong.

Copying a number moves the liability from the person who wrote it to the person who copied it.

So the page does the cheap, unglamorous thing. It tells you to go read it in Don's own post, and it links you there.

The rarer thing that page does

Look at what else is on it.

It hands you a way around itself. Three of them.

Under the give button there is a link asking whether you would rather give to Wings of Promise directly.

Further down there is a mailing address for Wings of Promise and instructions on exactly what to write in the memo line so the gift stays designated.

And the page says plainly that tax receipts come from Wings of Promise, not from Don and Patti. It goes further and tells you that if a receipt matters to you, mail your gift straight to them instead.

It also names the pastor who oversees the funds and the project, names the church he serves in Vidor, and quotes Don saying every gift will be handed over publicly.

That is a fundraising page telling you how to give without going through it, and telling you up front what it cannot give you.

Why any of this matters to your business

Every price on your site is a claim. Every claim has a source, and the source is almost never written down anywhere.

Go look at your own site this week holding one question. Where did this number come from.

Where did the price come from, and when.

Where did the turnaround time come from.

Where did trusted by hundreds of customers come from.

Where did the years in business, the square footage, the response time come from.

Write the source beside each one. Anything you cannot trace, source it or take it down.

The untraceable ones are the ones somebody asks you about on the worst possible day, and you end up doing math in your head in front of a customer who is already deciding about you.

And where you genuinely cannot publish a figure, say so out in the open. The price is in his post, go read it there, is a stronger sentence than a number you cannot defend.

One thing I would fix

The home page lists Don's Maize Mill Request post under a Dominican Republic label while the request itself is for Malawi. One word in one field. That is the whole punch list.

I am putting it in the article rather than quietly fixing it and saying nothing, because that is the same standard the page itself is holding to.

The bottom line

A page that publishes one price and refuses to publish the other is not being difficult. It is being exact.

Exact is what people remember about you once the money is real.

Most businesses have this backwards. They will put any number on the site to fill the space, then spend years quietly hoping nobody checks.

Put the number up, or put the reason up.

There is no third option that does not eventually cost you.

I build this kind of thing for people, in accounts they own, at The LeadFlow Pro. The pages are the receipts.