They Published the Years They Did Not Go

Most organizations publish their good years.

Don and Patti Nichols publish all of them.

Their mission trip record at donandpatti.com/trips is a numbered timeline running back to July 2013. Sixteen entries. Thirteen of them are trips. Three of them are years where nothing happened, sitting in the same list, in the same order, with the reason written down.

2020. No mission trips due to COVID-19 international travel restrictions.

2021. No mission trips due to open-heart surgery and recovery.

2022. Continued recovery from surgery. No mission trips.

Nobody makes you do that.

You could quietly drop those rows. The page would read cleaner. Thirteen trips in a row looks better than thirteen trips and three years of nothing. A donor scrolling fast would never know the difference.

They left them in.

What the record actually says

The trips page headline states thirteen mission trips across five countries. The countries listed are Belize, the Dominican Republic, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia.

The field cards break the thirteen down. Malawi carries eight trips between 2013 and 2019. The Dominican Republic carries four, beginning with logistics support in 2017 and then three years running for medical clinics and evangelism. Belize carries one, June 8 through 13, 2026.

Eight plus four plus one is thirteen. That arithmetic is mine and not theirs, but it matches the number they published.

That single Belize trip is the whole point of the page.

The Belize 2026 trip page says it plainly. It was the first mission trip since 2023, and it came after two years given to open-heart surgery and recovery. Six days in the field, June 8 through 13, and fifty three photographs from it.

Thirteen years of work, and the most recent entry in the record is a comeback.

One number I am not going to smooth over

The headline on the trips page says thirteen mission trips across five countries, and the two years they could not go.

The timeline underneath it lists three years they could not go. 2020, 2024, and 2025.

The charitable read, and I think it is the right one, is that the headline is counting the surgery pause specifically, which was two years, and not counting 2020, which was a travel restriction rather than a health matter. The Belize trip page describes exactly two years given to surgery and recovery, which supports that read.

But the headline sits directly above a list of three, and a reader who counts will notice.

I am pointing it out instead of writing around it, because that is the standard the rest of the page sets. It is a one word fix.

The lesson, for anybody with a website

Every business I work with has empty years. Or empty quarters. Or a stretch where the thing you are known for did not happen.

The instinct is to hide it. Publish the wins, let the gaps close up behind you, hope nobody builds a timeline.

That instinct is backwards, and here is why.

A record with no gaps in it is not more impressive. It is less believable. Everybody reading it already knows that thirteen straight years of anything does not happen to real people. When the record is too clean, the reader does not conclude that you are exceptional. The reader concludes that they are not seeing everything.

The gaps are what make the rest of it credible.

There is a second reason and it matters more.

A person deciding whether to trust you with money is not really asking whether you had a perfect run. They are asking what you do when it goes wrong. A page that shows two years off the field and then a trip in June answers that question without making a single claim about character.

You cannot argue somebody into believing you are resilient.

You can show them a timeline.

What this actually is

This is a ministry site. It is also a system.

The trips page is a structured record, not a paragraph somebody rewrites once a year. Each field links to its own page. Each trip links to its own photographs. The photo archive runs 509 photographs across five countries, every picture taken by Don and Patti themselves. The Open Book publishes where the money went. The cost page publishes what a trip costs before anybody gives a dollar.

All of it sits on a domain they own. None of it depends on a platform deciding to show it to anyone.

That is the build. Connected pages, real records, accounts the client keeps.

The best thing on that entire site is three rows that say nothing happened.

Anybody can publish a highlight reel.

Publishing the empty years is the part that makes the rest of it worth reading.