Twenty-Two Free Things Before They Ask You for Anything

My folks run a free medical mission to Belize.

Free clinics. Free medicine. Free reading glasses. Free Bibles. Thirteen years of it now, across five countries, every trip written down in order, including the years they could not go.

I have written about the record before.

Here is the part I had not looked at until this week.

Their site gives away twenty-two things for free before it asks a reader for a single dollar.

Six guides. Eight tools. Eight articles with real charts in them. All of it sitting on one page at donandpatti.com/resources, and the page says it in its own heading: free to use, free to share.

The one that stopped me cold

Go down the tool list and find the Support Letter Generator.

It asks eight questions and writes you a one page mission trip support letter.

A fundraising letter. For your trip.

Read that again.

A ministry that runs entirely on donations built a free tool that helps a complete stranger raise money that does not come to them.

The guide that goes with it does not hold anything back either. It lays out the six part structure of a letter that actually gets answered. It hands over real numbers to be specific with. It tells you to name the actual amount instead of saying any amount helps, because, in its own words, vague asks get vague answers.

And the FAQ at the bottom of that guide answers the money question straight. Is the generator free? Yes. It runs in your browser, it saves nothing, and you can copy or download the letter as a text file.

The whole library

Free resources published at donandpatti.com/resources

Source: Resources page, donandpatti.com, fetched September 14, 2026 ↗

Twenty-two items. I counted the guide cards and the tool cards myself on the page, and the article figure is the page own count. The share card that page builds for itself reads six guides, eight tools, eight articles, and my count matches it.

The guides cover what to pack, how to make a hygiene kit for about three dollars, how to pray for a team across seven days, why a sixty cent pair of reading glasses matters, and what sponsoring a missionary actually covers.

The tools include a budget calculator built on real unit costs, a hygiene kit party planner, printable prayer cards, a church poster with your church name and a QR code on it, and the trunk inventory sheet that actually travels through customs.

That last one is somebody operating paperwork. Handed over to anybody who wants it.

Nothing here asks for an account

The tools section carries one sentence I want every business owner reading this to sit with.

Nothing here asks for an account and nothing is saved.

Most sites would have put a gate in front of every one of those. Give us your email and we will send you the packing list. That is the normal play. It converts. Everybody does it.

They did not do it.

So where is the ask?

It is at the bottom. It is one line, and the line is not asking for money at all. It asks you to leave an email so you get the next guide.

Why that beats the gate

A gate collects addresses from people who wanted a PDF.

This collects addresses from people who already used something of yours and found it useful. Those are not the same list. Only one of them opens your email six months later.

There is a second thing the free version does that a gated version structurally cannot. Twenty-two free, specific, useful pages that answer what somebody types into a search bar at eleven at night is twenty-two separate front doors into the mission.

The resources page says it plainly in one of its own section headings: these are the questions people ask before they know Don name.

That is the entire strategy in one line.

Be the answer first. Be a name second.

The ask they do make

At the bottom of that support letter guide is a short block I think is the best written thing on the whole site.

Everything on this page is given away free in Belize. Somebody back home pays for it first. If this guide was useful, that is how you stand in it.

Then a button that says Fill the Trunks.

No guilt. No countdown. No urgency bar. Just a plain fact about how any of it got paid for, and an open door.

Two small things they should fix

I am not going to write a piece about somebody being careful and then be sloppy about the places they are not.

One. The support letter guide is careful about attribution in a way I wish more sites were. Twice on that page there is a label reading general guidance, not Don words, separating the site own advice from what Don has actually published. That is exactly the right instinct.

My note is that the page tells you whose words these are not, and never tells you whose words they are. It credits itself as built from Don Nichols published record, and the byline only exists down in the page underlying metadata, which no visitor ever sees. One line at the top would close it.

Two. The trips page headline still reads thirteen mission trips across five countries and the two years they could not go, while the timeline directly underneath it lists three: 2020 for travel restrictions, 2024 for surgery, 2025 for recovery. I flagged that the last time I wrote about this site.

What is interesting is that it has been half fixed. The card for the timeline article over on the resources page now reads the three years they could not go. So somebody corrected the number in one place and not the other, which is the most common way a fact goes wrong on a website: it lives in two spots and only one of them gets edited.

Neither of these is a big deal. I only mention them because the rest of the site sets such a high bar that the gaps stand out.

What to take from this

If you sell anything at all, you have a version of that trunk inventory sheet.

It is the checklist you built over ten years. The pricing worksheet. The process you assume is your actual advantage and would never hand to a stranger.

You are guarding it, and it is not protecting you.

The person who reads it and goes and does it themselves was never going to hire you. The person who reads it and sees how many moving parts there really are will call you before they finish the second page.

Publish it.

Then ask for one thing, once, at the bottom, and make the thing you ask for be permission to help them again.

If you want to see the whole library, it is right here, and it costs nothing.

And if any of it is useful to you, that is how you stand in it. Fill a trunk.