The look-you-up test, and what a funder sees before they agree to meet

Somewhere between your email arriving and a reply going out, the person you wrote to searches your organisation. It takes them under a minute and you never see it happen. What comes back on that screen does more to decide the meeting than the email did.

I call it the look-you-up test, and it is the cheapest audit in this trade because you can run it on yourself in ten minutes.

How do you run it?

Open a browser you are not signed into, in a private window, so you are not being shown the version of the internet that already knows you. Search your organisation's name. Then search it the way a stranger would type it, which is usually the short version, sometimes misspelled.

Then do the same thing in whichever AI assistant you use, and ask it plainly: what does this organisation do, and is it credible.

Read what comes back as though you had never heard of the place.

What are you actually looking for?

Four things, in this order.

Whether you appear at all, above the fold, on your own name. If a directory listing, an old news article or a similarly named organisation is ahead of you, that is the first problem and it is usually the easiest to fix.

Whether the description is current. Organisations change what they do faster than the internet notices. A funder reading a description of the programme you ran four years ago is being told something inaccurate by a source they trust more than your email.

Whether the facts are right. Registration details, the province you work in, the name of whoever leads it now. Small errors do disproportionate damage here, because a funder who spots one wrong fact reasonably assumes there are others.

Whether anything at all is dated. A site with no recent activity reads as an organisation that may not still exist, and a person deciding whether to spend an hour with you will not investigate further to find out.

• Do you appear above the fold on your own name? · fix this first

  A directory or a similarly named organisation ranking ahead of you is common and fixable.

• Is the description of what you do current? · fix this first

  Organisations change faster than the internet notices, and the stale version is the one being read.

• Are the basic facts right? · usually fine

  Registration, region, who leads it. One visible error implies others that are not visible.

• Is there anything with a recent date on it? · usually fine

  No sign of life this year reads as an organisation that may no longer be running.

Why has this got harder?

Because a growing share of that first check is now made by an assistant rather than a search page, and an assistant does not show its working. It answers in a paragraph, in a confident voice, and the person reading has no obvious way to tell whether the paragraph came from your own website or from a stale third-party listing.

That changes what you have to maintain. It is no longer enough to have a good website. The facts about you have to be legible in the places these systems draw from, which means your own site saying clearly and in plain sentences what you do, where, since when, and for whom.

I have written about the commercial version of this problem in your next customer may never see your website, and the mechanics are identical. The stakes are just different: a business loses a sale, an organisation loses a grant round it never knew it was in.

What do you actually fix, and in what order?

Fix your own pages first, because they are the only surface you fully control. One page that states what the organisation does, who it serves and where, in language a stranger would use rather than the language of your sector, does more than any other single change.

Then fix the third-party records that rank. A registry entry, a directory listing, an old profile on a platform nobody at your organisation has logged into for years. These are usually editable and almost always neglected.

Then give the site something with a date on it. Not a blog programme nobody has time for, just evidence that this year happened. An annual report, a project update, a page for the thing you are running now.

What does this have to do with fundraising?

Everything, but indirectly. Nobody funds an organisation because its search results are tidy. What happens is quieter than that: a tidy result removes a reason to say no, at the exact moment when saying no costs the funder nothing.

That is the honest size of the claim. This work does not win you money. It stops you losing meetings you were never told you lost, and for most organisations there is a surprising number of those.

If you want the test run properly rather than by yourself, it is part of what I do for non-profits and the first pass is free.