Your Most Durable Asset Is Still Your Website

There is a comfortable story going around right now. Social ate the web. Then AI ate search. So the website barely matters anymore. I don't buy it. 

Your website is the one channel you actually own. It is the one place you control the narrative and the experience, instead of renting attention from an algorithm. Everything else is borrowed ground.

That is what I mean by durable. Social and email keep shifting under you. The reach, the filters, what people actually see. You control almost none of it. 

A website does not churn that way. It compounds. Someone clicks a link or follows a warm intro, and they land somewhere you built on purpose. Then they start sizing up how legit you are, based on what they find.

The money is where it gets real. A six-figure overhaul is a hard sell when the current site works. It takes ticket sales. It processes donations. So a redo is not always the right call. 

What tells you it is worth it is the gap. The gap between how the site portrays you and who you actually are. Small gap? Put your energy elsewhere. Wide gap? The site is holding you back, and you probably will not see it in your numbers.

Here is how I'd put it to a board. Your website is a player on your team. You would never let an employee coast on the bare minimum. 

A website that is merely good enough is doing exactly that. Treat it like a real member of the team, one that shapes how people see you more than most. The question of whether to invest gets a lot easier to answer.
 

Episode Highlights:

[00:00:00] The website as your most durable, most controllable brand asset 
[00:03:00] The identity impact gap, and when a redo is actually the wrong call 
[00:04:30] Why "websites are dead" has been wrong for 20 years 
[00:09:00] Transactional, informational, and storytelling: the competing flavors of a site
[00:10:30] The 10-second homepage test 90% of nonprofit sites fail 
[00:12:00] Connecting the digital space to the physical space 
[00:13:00] Brand as coherence: the Apple experience, and your version of it 
[00:15:30] Getting to the brass tacks on a $100K investment 
[00:17:30] What happens the moment a funder leaves your meeting 
[00:23:30] What funders actually look for: financials, team bios, clear impact 
[00:26:00] Your website should be your best fundraiser, not your only one 
[00:28:00] The underperforming employee analogy, and the player on your team 
[00:30:30] The garden: why a site needs pruning, not autopilot

Notable Quotes:

[00:05:20]: "I still believe that your website is your most important and your most durable asset as a brand." Eric Ressler 

[00:11:05]: "Most of those also aren't very clear and they're full of buzzwords. 90% of nonprofit websites fail that test, and that's not even an exaggeration." Eric Ressler 

[00:12:20]: "We're interacting with tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people online and they can't all come here. So what is that warm, welcoming, inviting place that I'm sending everybody to?" Jonathan Hicken 

[00:18:30]: "No one cares that you're a nonprofit when they're trying to buy a ticket. They just want to buy the ticket and they expect it to work just as well as checking out on Amazon." Eric Ressler 

[00:26:20]: "Your website should be your best fundraiser, not your only fundraiser." Eric Ressler 

[00:29:10]: "Website is almost the wrong word. It's a player on your team." Jonathan Hicken 

Resources & Links:

• Seymour Marine Discovery Center — Jonathan's organization, part of UC Santa Cruz
• Candid — nonprofit transparency and data platform, formerly part of what was Charity Navigator's ecosystem
• Charity Navigator — charity watchdog and ratings organization referenced in the funder research discussion
• “Are Websites Dead?" — earlier Designing Tomorrow episode.
• Joel Breakstone interview — earlier Designing Tomorrow episode.

P.S. — Struggling to align your message with your mission? We help social impact leaders like you build trust-building brands through authentic storytelling, thoughtful design, and digital strategy that works. Let's talk about your goals »

Full Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:00:00]: I still believe that your website is your most important and your most durable asset as a brand. Your website, you do have full control over. If someone visits your website because they clicked a link or got a text message, you control the narrative, you control the experience. They are grading not only your website, but they are also subconsciously or consciously grading how effective and legit you are as an organization.

Jonathan Hicken [00:00:25]: I draw a correlation between the physical space that I have and the digital space that I have. And so one of the biggest arguments for me about investing in our website is we're interacting with tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people online and they can't all come here. So what is that warm, welcoming, inviting, exciting place that I'm sending everybody to go have that experience at?

Eric Ressler [00:00:45]: I'm Eric Ressler.

Jonathan Hicken [00:00:50]: I'm Jonathan Hicken.

Eric Ressler [00:00:50]: And this is Designing Tomorrow. 

Jonathan Hicken [00:00:55]: Eric, I have a confession. I haven't updated my website in five years. Now to be clear, I don't mean updates. Obviously we're changing events and stuff like that.

Eric Ressler [00:01:10]: Okay. My heart skipped a beat there.

Jonathan Hicken [00:01:10]: But we haven't done shit with our website in five years. And every so often it comes back to my desk, "Hey, let's update our website. Hey, let's update our website." And I keep kicking the can down the road. And so I want to spend today asking you some tough questions about why the heck I should spend the time and the money to redo the website.

Eric Ressler [00:01:35]: Okay. This could get spicy. Full disclosure, I sell websites for a living to some degree. So we're at Cosmic, a design agency, a brand strategy agency, and a lot of times that work includes bringing the brand identity into digital experiences, the website, social, et cetera. So I've got a little bit of bias in this discussion, but I also believe really strongly that the website is still very important. I'm happy to dig into it.

Jonathan Hicken [00:02:00]: And full disclosure, I would love to find a way to hire you to do our website. So this is kind of like an informal interview on whether or not we should do this.

Eric Ressler [00:02:10]: Since we're there, I'd love to read your website, man. Let's go. So what's stopping you? I want to hear why do you keep kicking the can down the road? You've got some structural issues, I think, but I want to hear it from you.

Jonathan Hicken [00:02:20]: At the end of the day, our website needs to inform people about when we're open, which Google Business does for us most of the time. It needs to be a place where people can sign up for our programs and it needs to be a place where people can make financial transactions, buy tickets, become a member, donate, et cetera. It's doing those things and it's doing those things decently well. So why should I spend the six figure investment to make it world-class? Ultimately it's kind of like I got more important shit to work on.

Eric Ressler [00:02:55]: What's the ROI? Well, I guess what I would say is to put your particular situation aside just for a second, I don't always think redoing a website is the right call. When people come to us, it usually is, but that's because people are coming to us usually in some kind of transformative moment for the organization, some kind of pivotal moment. Either they're starting a new org or there's a new ED or there's a new vision or a new strategic plan. And basically there's this, well, we named it on the show a couple weeks ago, this identity impact gap, where their true identity as an organization and who they are and who they're becoming and how they are representing themselves, how they are communicating, how are they perceived by their audience, there's a gap there and that gap is a major problem. So if you're in a situation where that gap isn't very big, you should not redo your website. You should be focusing your efforts somewhere else. But if you're in a situation where whether it's the website or any other touchpoint for the brand is not aligned with who you are and who you're becoming, then it is actually actively holding you back.

Jonathan Hicken [00:04:05]: Take us back a couple of years because we actually did an episode called Our Website's Dead in 2024. So let's set the scene a little bit. Set the stage on what you have seen the role websites playing back then versus now, how it's changed, et cetera.

Eric Ressler [00:04:25]: So I think when I did that episode, that was actually season one when it was just me on the show.

Jonathan Hicken [00:04:25]: Oh damn. We've talked about website enough.

Eric Ressler [00:04:30]: We've talked about it before too, but the one you're referring to, Our Website's Dead. I was at the time thinking about that more because there was this narrative at the time that everything happens on social now and websites don't matter, which I think is not true, first of all. I don't think it was true then. Now there's kind of this newer narrative being formed around like, well, everything's AI now and people don't even go to your website anymore, which also is not true, but it is a factor that now there's a new technological shift and both those things are still happening. And despite all of those things being true to a degree, yes, a lot of brand expression happens through social or through email or other channels or in person. And yes, AI is eating up a lot of organic search, so less people are maybe coming to your website through Google, although that's all changing, which I'm sure we'll touch on. I still believe that your website is your most important and your most durable asset as a brand.

Jonathan Hicken [00:05:25]: What do you mean by durable?

Eric Ressler [00:05:25]: What I mean by durable is like social media and email to a degree even. They're constantly changing. What's in the algorithm? Who gets attention? Why? What's popular? How are you perceived? You lack a lot of control. They're not these owned channels. And email used to be kind of considered an owned channel and it's becoming less and less of one as even emails have new filters and promotions tab. And just because you send an email to someone, certainly if it's a promotional email, there's no guarantee people are going to see that email anymore. Your website, you do have full control over. If someone visits your website because they clicked a link or got a text message, you control the narrative, you control the experience and that in a good faith way should be used responsibly to be authentic about who you are. It also means that anyone can spin up a website and spin a narrative that could be completely false, which we learned about when we interviewed Joel from Civic Online Reasoning recently. And one of the things he pointed to is people trust websites that look good. They trust websites that have an EDU or a .org domain, even though they might be a shell of a propaganda machine or something like that. So you can use that benefit responsibly. And I would argue that when people come to a website, they are grading not only your website, but they are also subconsciously or consciously grading how effective and legit you are as an organization. People come to the website and it's a total mess. It doesn't make sense. It looks poorly designed. It feels like some cousin's second project. People start to wonder, rightfully so, is this org even legit? If they don't care about how they present themselves in their most important asset, are they also kind of lame when it comes to their impact? So these are some of the things that I would think about. I'm happy to go more into true ROI on websites when done well, but even just at a base level, we just have to be pragmatic about if your website doesn't look legit, people are going to judge you based on that, rightfully or not.

Jonathan Hicken [00:07:25]: So durability for you is about weathering time and you're making a bet that websites are going to continue to have value no matter how the internet changes.

Eric Ressler [00:07:35]: People have been saying the website is going to die for like 20 years. Now lots of things are changing about the web and the internet and technology and websites have made major changes. A lot of people are experiencing websites on a phone instead of a computer now or they're finding your website because they were researching something online and your organization got cited. So they might not even go to the website, but that website is still informing people about you and your work. And we have people coming to us right now who search for the best social impact design agencies and we come to the top of that search and they find us that way, not because they Google searched. Now I'd like to think that most of them go visit the website and look at our work and learn more about us, but some of them maybe don't and they just book a call right away. The website still serves value in that situation because if the website didn't exist and it wasn't well designed and reputable, and by well designed, I don't just mean visually well designed, but structurally well designed. The data was there for the AI search agent to find and to consume properly, then it wouldn't have ever surfaced you in the results. So there's all these intangible benefits to the website too.

Jonathan Hicken [00:08:45]: I wonder what you think about the sort of frame of mind, and probably every organization's a little different here, so it might be hard for you to broad swath answer this question, but do your best. So there's a frame of mind when we think about how we're interacting with organizations online, we're either watching a video on YouTube or seeing a post or a reel on social or now on AI we're learning about it by asking questions of ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. What's the mentality of somebody when they're visiting a website that's different from one of those interaction modes?

Eric Ressler [00:09:20]: So I think people come to websites for very different reasons. I think that's one of the things that's so hard about designing websites well is that especially in the social impact space, there's usually multiple competing priorities. And then from your audiences that you're serving, but even from your own team around what you want the website to do and what it should do. I have this kind of paradigm that I think about. Websites usually have some kind of flavor or series of flavors. So there are some websites that need to have some kind of transactional element. So for the Seymour Center, you need to sell tickets and that transactional element might be the only reason someone's coming to the website and their experience of the website is going to be majorly influenced by how intuitive and frictionless that process was. And even that experience can have a major influence on their overall brand experience with the Seymour Center. But beyond that, in the best case, someone maybe comes in for a transactional experience but gets the best websites, you spend 20 minutes on it and you only meant to spend one minute on it, because you enter this experience and you find yourself wandering the halls of this digital space that's so beautiful and so inspiring that you lose a sense of yourself and your time. And I think that's what we aim for when we're translating brand strategy into websites. There's these transactional needs, there's these informational needs, we have reports, we have resources, et cetera. There's storytelling needs. I need people within 10 seconds to clearly understand my organization, who we're for, how we help people, what we do. 90% of nonprofit websites fail that test. That's not even an exaggeration at all. When people come to us, they might have their mission statement, they might have their vision statement. Most of those also aren't very clear and they're full of buzzwords. So we have a test that we run on website homepages, not that we hope people do this or expect people to, but if someone came only to your homepage and read only the first section of your homepage, they should be able to understand who you are and what you do and who you do it for. If they scroll through the whole homepage, they should be able to understand what other opportunities they have on the website and they should be able to understand a little bit more depth around the ethos of the organization, what you believe, what you stand for, your point of view so that if all they do is see the homepage and you test them, they basically get it. Again, most nonprofit websites and social impact websites egregiously fail that test.

Jonathan Hicken [00:11:50]: I draw a correlation between the physical space that I have and the digital space that I have on this. And sort of setting aside the integration of the digital and the physical for a second. When I think of people walking in our front doors, or actually even before they even enter the building, what they're seeing on the outside, I want them to feel a certain sense of belonging or a certain sense of excitement about entering the space. And so one of the biggest arguments for me about investing in our website is we're interacting with tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people online and they can't all come here. So what is that warm, welcoming, inviting, exciting place that I'm sending everybody to go have that experience at? And for us, because we have a physical space too, even more power if we can get those two things sort of feeling the same.

Eric Ressler [00:12:45]: Right. And I think what you're touching on there is something that I would basically just call brand experience. And when I think about building brands, there's all these different places that your brand shows up. People think about brands as like your logo and your colors and those things are part of your brand, but really at the end of the day, your brand is, how did people feel interacting with your organization however they were doing it. If it was on your Google page, if it was on your website, if it was on your social feed, if it was in person, if it was at a closed door funder meeting, all of those are brand moments. And I think that in the best case and what you should be striving for is that there's a coherence between all of those. And the best brands in the world do this amazingly well. A common example would be Apple. Apple is highly regarded as one of the best branded organizations in the world and you can criticize Apple and some of the moves they've made have been bad for sure, but you kind of know when you're going to do anything with Apple, you're going to get an Apple experience. And what does that mean? It means premium, it means effortless, it means beautiful, it means modern. Those are just the first four words that pop into my brain when I think about Apple as a brand, but it's not because of their design in an aesthetic standpoint. It's because of their human design. It's what does it feel like to interact with an Apple product compared to a non-Apple product? I have my qualms, but for the most part, there's a reason why they're one of the most successful companies in the world. Social impact organizations are not Apple. They shouldn't try to be Apple, but you need to figure out what your version of that is. What's the Seymour Center brand? What's the Seymour Center experience and how is it coherent between seeing you online on your website, coming into the front door and experiencing the center, looking at the latest Science Solutions Santa Cruz YouTube video. All of that should be a coherent experience that all works synergistically together.

Eric Ressler [00:14:40]: Hey friends, real quick before we continue today's episode. I'm Eric Ressler, founder and creative director at Cosmic. Cosmic is a creative agency purpose built for nonprofits and mission driven organizations. For the last 15 years, we've helped leaders like you nail your impact story and sharpen your strategy, but we're not here to just leave you with a fancy slide deck and a pat on the back. We roll up our sleeves and help you bring our ideas to life through campaigns, creative and digital experiences. Our work together helps you earn trust, connect deeply with your supporters and grow your fundraising and your impact. If you value the thinking we share here and want it applied to your biggest challenges, let's talk at designbycosmic.com. All right, back to today's conversation.

Jonathan Hicken [00:15:25]: The brand part of this, honestly, this is a strong argument. I instantly see the value of creating this consistent brand experience online and in person for us. To me, that makes a ton of sense. I think where I really start to get a little nervous is when I think about the actual dollars and cents of it all. So for me, I'm thinking about, okay, we need to convert X number more ticket sales in order to make the investment worth it, or we need to convert X number of members or somehow attribute a donor experience to actually closing a gift.

Eric Ressler [00:16:05]: Let's get to the brass tacks here.

Jonathan Hicken [00:16:05]: Let's get right into that because-

Eric Ressler [00:16:10]: Let's pick a somewhat arbitrary number and let's say a major website overhaul for an established organization is $100,000. It's not always going to be that. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less, but just to make the math easy and somewhat realistic. So the obvious way to think about this is not as a cost, but as an investment. And so when you make any kind of investment, you are not expecting instantaneous returns. Unless you are buying a company or something and then you might get some short term wins no matter what the investment is. But some investments, like you think about stocks, you may lose your shirt on a stock for 10 years and then make it all back and then some 20 years later. A website should not be that, but the way that I think about websites, and again, when I think about the ROI and when the right time is, if you're generally in a place of stability, a non-growth year, a subtle consolidation style year, it's probably not a good investment for you, but the bigger that gap is between how your website is portraying you as an organization and who you actually are and who you're becoming, that is a major, major, major problem that has all kinds of insidious and invisible issues. So it may not be something that you're even aware of that it's hurting you. Let's make this real. You have a funder meeting, it goes great, you've been introduced, you've got a warm intro. What's the very first thing that funder does after the meeting? Almost certainly.

Jonathan Hicken [00:17:40]: They're going to go to your website.

Eric Ressler [00:17:40]: They're going to go to your website. What do you want that experience to be for them? You want it to not just confirm the things they already know about you. You definitely don't want it to be like, whoa, this is the same org that I just talked to that I was really excited about. This looks pretty janky. They don't talk about any of the things on here we just talked about. Am I even on the right website? This literally happens sometimes. But really we want the website to help be this kind of always on asset for you that's constantly working for you so that anytime someone comes there, it's not only reinforcing the brand experience that they have in the real world, but it's this whole other set of reinforcing experiences. So for the Seymour Center, let's try and make this real. Yes, frictionless ticket buying experience. Those transactional elements need to be best in class, modern. No one cares that you're a nonprofit when they're trying to buy a ticket. They just want to buy the ticket and they expect it to work just as well as checking out on Amazon. When they search your website, they expect it to work just as well when they're searching on Google. So you don't get a pass just because you're a small org. People have standards and bars that for better or for worse have been set by the world's biggest tech companies that have hundreds of people working on making these experiences frictionless. So that's the transactional side. But for the Seymour Center, now you have Science Solutions Santa Cruz. This is an amazing asset and it's wildly successful already so early on. Why isn't that on your website right now? Why isn't that one of the first things I can learn about? Let's say I'm searching here, I'm here for the weekend, I want to do something fun with my kids. I land on your Google page, I come to your website, I buy a ticket, I'm done. I'm not doing anything else in there. But what if I come and like, whoa, I didn't know this about the Seymour Center. Holy crap, they're doing all this stuff. Whoa, they have a whole podcast, and now you're starting to build relationships with people. So yes, websites absolutely can hold you back, but often there's also this kind of like, it's good enough to do the job, which is kind of what I heard you say at the beginning.

Jonathan Hicken [00:19:35]: Which is pretty much exactly what I said.

Eric Ressler [00:19:35]: And that's true. And so you need to decide at some point, whether it's with us or someone else or whatever, when is the right time for you to make that not just good enough, but part of propelling you forward in the mission? And when you have all the right ingredients together, which to me would be like major growth or pivot opportunity or reinvention of who you are, new assets to work with like Science Solutions Santa Cruz that aren't being utilized or just some kind of dissonance between how you are perceived through the website and who you actually are. To me, those are strong cases where yes, it's a big investment of not just money, but also time and thought, but once you make that investment and you do it well, it compounds over time just like investing in any solid investment really.

Jonathan Hicken [00:20:20]: I'll peel back the curtain a little bit and just be like, one of the reasons I have hesitated on moving to revamp the website is that the strategy that we have been developing and that we're about to launch in a really big way here soon, I wanted to make sure that it was sticky. I wanted to make sure it was road tested. I wanted to make sure that what we were doing was going to fit, was going to deliver within our niche and I didn't want to do a major transformation of the digital assets until I knew that that would stick.

Eric Ressler [00:20:55]: I think that's a smart pragmatic move. And there's a tension there because you don't want it to be so late that you're out there having those conversations right now. You got people excited about it and there's probably people who you've met with who have heard about this who've come to the website and been like, wait, where's the Science Solutions Santa Cruz stuff? Wait, this isn't what Jonathan was just telling me about in the donor meeting we just had. So I could pick a pretty strong case that it is probably holding you back more than you realize. You're still obviously doing great. We should also, since we're just trying to be transparent here, you're locked into a university system. And this happens sometimes with academic nonprofits and not only in that case where your hands are tied, you can't revamp the website. There's some creative things you can do around that to build alongside the main website and cross-pollinate. We've run into this before where orgs come to us and they're like, hey, we want to build a really cool immersive impact report, but we can't touch the website. What do we do? So what we usually do is we'll spin up a microsite that sits on top of it or beside it in a subdomain or something. So there's ways around some of those constraints, but that's not really the true solution. The true solution is when possible to own the infrastructure and to not ever have tech be a reason why you can't put your best foot forward as a brand. I understand in your situation and others, that's a nice to have. It's not something that you can always have full control over, but that's a factor too.

Jonathan Hicken [00:22:20]: And I tip my cap to the university in a way because they've locked all of their entities into a certain set of templates because they're trying to build a brand too.

Eric Ressler [00:22:30]: They're doing their own brand building.

Jonathan Hicken [00:22:35]: Totally. And so now we have to respect that. We need to work within those constraints. But yes, that is a constraint that may be unique to my situation that others may have, but I don't have totally free unbounded ability to build whatever I want, at least not in the way I'm thinking about it. And maybe that's part of the reason why I'm hesitating.

Eric Ressler [00:22:55]: My gut level tells me that's a big part of it because you're just like, can I even do it? And feeling like, oh, there's not only just the financial investment and the time and energy, but possibly even a political fight with the university or even just a straight up like, you can't do it, man. I want to go back to this ROI conversation a little bit though, because I want to just even share for our listeners, we've had the privilege, I guess, or the opportunity to work directly with major funders and program officers and pick their brain around, hey, when you're assessing an org, specifically on the website, what do you need? And we heard that across the board with everyone we've ever asked is like, how do you do research on orgs? And yes, they ask their peer funders and yes, they ask their network, but they also do their own research and they usually do it starting on your website. And we ask, what are the things that you want? And what we heard is a couple things. One, transparent financials, 100% needs to be there, easy to find. So we often will build out a section of websites that's specifically for major funders that's just like, here's the checklist of everything you want. So they want financials and they want history of at least the last five years of those financials because what they're doing is they're saying, can this org absorb a gift of this size? Are they operationally ready and able to take this and turn it into impact? Do they have the right leadership team? What's the pay structure? All that kind of stuff, their inputs for their decision making. So you want those financials to be super accessible, well presented, easy to find right off the bat. Some of these charity watchdog style organizations like what used to be Charity Navigator is now Candid, those can be nice signals as well that showcase some credibility and some transparency too, but you don't need them as long as you are being transparent in how you communicate your things. So that's one. The other thing is team bios, which I know can be kind of. We've been working with more and more orgs, especially in this state of play where people are concerned about even their staff being heckled or targeted in some way.

Jonathan Hicken [00:25:10]: Targeted in some way.

Eric Ressler [00:25:10]: Who are leaning away from full name or even photos on their team bios, which I completely respect. But in general, funders want to know who the team is and want to know who they're investing in. And so when you feel like that's a responsible move, I would highly recommend not just only having the leadership team and then just like everyone else goes away. Other things that we heard from some of those meetings is like, if you can't articulate your impact clearly, if you can't articulate your theory of change clearly, which does not mean a schematic diagram, but just like, here's how we do the work and why your intervention is another way of thinking about that. What's the way that you actually create impact? If you can't clearly articulate in a way that makes sense in English who you are, who you do your work for that doesn't require some kind of Rubik's cube to solve, all those things are just creating friction and lacking confidence in an organization that actually knows those things and has clarity around it. So those are just some high level tips. I don't want to diverge too much because I think we could do a full episode on this, but when we're talking about ROI, to sum this up, your website should sell things for you. And what I mean by that is your website should be your best fundraiser, not your only fundraiser. Jonathan, for you, you're out there having meetings and your website is your number two, because that's the very first thing that people are going to do after having those meetings with you or even before in order to get the meeting in the first place.

Jonathan Hicken [00:26:30]: You know what's funny is you helped me do this case for support and so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make that case for support the second place.

Eric Ressler [00:26:45]: It has to be.

Jonathan Hicken [00:26:45]: For us because the website's not where it needs to be. So I'm like aggressively being, look at this first, this is the thing that's going to bring home the deal or whatever.

Eric Ressler [00:26:55]: I think that makes sense. And I think in the best case you would have the case for support and then also the website would just reinforce all of the things you saw in there.

Jonathan Hicken [00:27:05]: What's sort of occurring to me now is that there's this hidden cost to having a website, which is for those donor experiences and they're going to the website as a second place. I'm not seeing their drop off. I'm not seeing their thought process. That's not getting back to me really in any way. I guess you could make the argument that I could probably track rate of closed deals and maybe attribute some of it to the website, but-

Eric Ressler [00:27:35]: But how would you know that's the thing?

Jonathan Hicken [00:27:35]: There's a million reasons why that could be the thing. So I think part of what I'm walking away with is paying attention to these hidden costs of this asset that is not where it needs to be.

Eric Ressler [00:27:45]: Have you ever had an underperforming employee who you know. So this is a good analogy. You've maybe had an employee or a coworker who's clearly not pulling their weight. You know that feeling of just like, someone's not pulling their weight, like they're bringing the whole team down because of their energy or their lack of performance. Sometimes that's the website, but the sort of more dangerous one is the employee who's just kind of like checking the boxes who could be someone who's doing so much more than that. And it sounds to me like your situation is more the latter.

Jonathan Hicken [00:28:25]: For sure.

Eric Ressler [00:28:25]: A lot of people come to us where they're like, we know this thing is actively hurting us, help.

Jonathan Hicken [00:28:30]: Yeah.

Eric Ressler [00:28:30]: And maybe that's right at some level. I would personally advise against waiting till it's that bad, but you do have to have some kind of pain for it to be worthwhile. And I would say if you've ever had an experience with an employee like that who then gets replaced by someone who's not just phoning it in, but who's excellent and then you're like, I could have had this the whole time. That's kind of the experience we hear from clients we work with on websites where it's just like, I had no idea.

Jonathan Hicken [00:29:00]: I actually think that's a brilliant analogy and if you're not using that with clients in your sales processes, you should because-

Eric Ressler [00:29:05]: I will now.

Jonathan Hicken [00:29:05]: Yeah. Because actually as you were telling that story, I was like, website is almost the wrong word. I know it describes the asset, but it's a player on your team. And if you have a subpar player on your team, how do you as a leader deal with that? And a website is like doing work.

Eric Ressler [00:29:30]: And has almost an outsized influence compared to any one person on your team depending on the type of org that you are. We build websites all the time that have hundreds of thousands of unique impressions per month, per year. Very few staff members have that much influence over the perception of your brand. I'm not saying websites are more important than people, I'm just saying that they have a bigger influence on your brand perception sometimes.

Jonathan Hicken [00:29:55]: And just in my seat as executive director, that framing is like, this is a player on your team and how do you deal with average or low performers on your team? That's kind of an aha moment for me.

Eric Ressler [00:30:05]: I think it's a huge unlock in terms of how you think about it and I'd recommend to listeners they do think about it that way. And look, it's a big move to do a major website overhaul and we really try to build sites in a way that you don't do that over and over and over again. We actually had a client come back to us recently who we built their site over 10 years ago. They came back last year and we decided, you know what? We got to build it over. We very rarely do that because we are very intentional about we're building it in a way that we can always be iterating on it. Another analogy I would use for the website is like a garden. There are times where you need to build the garden and there are times where you need to prune and a garden is only as fruitful as the effort and the time and the care that you put into it every day. If you build the most amazing garden in the world and you don't water it and it doesn't get sunshine or there's disease or whatever, it will eventually fester and just become full of weeds and overgrown and eaten by critters, et cetera. And we see that basically same thing happen with websites. There's a big moment, everyone rallies, they build the new thing. Sometimes it's done well, often it's not, and then it just kind of gets put on autopilot. You would never manage an employee that way. You can't manage a website that way either. And the other thing I'll just point to that's another kind of intangible value about going through a website process is that it's going to force you to make some tough decisions. And I would say this is true for any kind of brand, any serious brand effort. In order to build a good website, you have to know who you are, you have to have solid messaging, you have to have solid understanding of who the website's for, who the audience is, what their needs are. All of that work either has to be done before or as part of a website overhaul in order for you to build something that's going to actually be durable and serve the community and really be an asset for you. So hard work, but also work well done that's going to serve you outside of just the outputs of the website itself.

Jonathan Hicken [00:32:05]: And that's the fundamental premise of Cosmic's work, right? Is that you enter at these moments of transformation and going through the process of building a website or a strategic plan or a case for support or whatever, you're going to get into these hard hitting self-evaluative questions.

Eric Ressler [00:32:20]: Yeah. And look, I'm biased in that and that's our approach, which is a great fit for some people and not a good fit for others. And frankly, I think a lot of times people are sort of scared away from websites is they've had one, two, three bad experiences. Unfortunately, many people who come to us come to us almost with past website traumas. And so we're also part therapist who's like, we will heal. It's going to be okay. We're going to get through this. And we know why that happened and we have a process to get around it, but there are absolutely people out there, agencies out there who are going to be happy to just do a tactical thing. Sometimes that's what you need. I don't think that I would usually recommend that approach unless there's just something so fundamentally broken. You can't get the budget to do it right and you got to just do an emergency stop gap. Every once in a while you got to do something like that.

Jonathan Hicken [00:33:10]: All right. Well, now you got me thinking about redoing our website here, buddy. So thanks for letting me grill you on it.

Eric Ressler [00:33:20]: I know a guy.

Jonathan Hicken [00:33:25]: All right. Thanks, Eric.

Eric Ressler [00:33:25]: All right, man, this is fun. If you enjoyed today's video, please be sure to hit like and subscribe or even leave us a comment. It really helps. Thank you. And thank you for all that you do for your cause and for being part of the movement to move humanity and the planet forward.