Ten years of helping kids nobody was helping. No website at all.

Situation

Disclosure first, because this one is about us. Your Heart Our Hands is affiliated with DeSoto. We are not describing a client engagement. We are describing work we did on our own house, and publishing it because the two problems it surfaced are ordinary ones.

The organization has been a 501(c)(3) since 2016, working with young people who have aged out of foster care. Ten years of real help: hearing aids, glasses, getting someone re-enrolled in school. Nobody drew a salary the entire time.

It had no website. Not an outdated one, not a neglected one. None. A decade of work with no place to point anyone, no way to be found by a young person who needed it, and nothing a prospective donor could read before deciding.

Intervention

We built the organization its first web presence. Two things surfaced along the way that mattered more than the design.

The money was going to the wrong name. The only existing way to give was a personal creator page belonging to an individual. It listed no charity in its configuration and paid a person's account, so a donor supporting a 501(c)(3) was funding an individual, and their card statement said so. Nobody had done anything wrong on purpose. It was the fastest way to accept money years earlier and was never revisited.

We evaluated the zero-fee platforms first, because for a volunteer-run charity the fee math genuinely matters. Both of the well-known ones are honestly free to the organization, and both fund themselves from a donor-facing tip pre-selected at checkout. Zeffy's own documentation puts the default at 17% on gifts up to $99.49 and 15% above $99.50, so a $100 donation is presented to the donor at $115. We recommended against them. An organization whose entire claim is that nobody takes a cut cannot route its giving through a default that quietly takes one. Donations moved to Stripe in the organization's own legal name, at roughly 4.8% on a recurring $25 donor. More expensive, disclosed, defensible. We also made the tax-receipt path fail closed, so a non-deductible purchase can never generate a deductibility claim by accident.

The statistics were invented. The design handoff arrived carrying numbers: foster-care population figures, how many young people age out each year, an outcomes chart. We checked each against primary sources and not one survived.

The most damaging claimed Arizona case management ends at 18. Extended Foster Care runs to the 21st birthday under A.R.S. section 8-521.02. Publishing it would have told an aged-out young adult, on a site built to help them, the opposite of the truth about their own eligibility. A claimed 14,000-plus state foster-care population overstated the real figure by roughly 74%. A claim that about 700 age out yearly was wrong in number and direction: the real figure is 546, and falling. An outcomes chart contrasting 95% against 49% had no source at all. The design tool had invented it.

All of it came out and was replaced with what the organization could attest to, which is less impressive and true: dozens helped over ten years, very few of whom finished high school or a GED. Formal tracking starts now. It was never kept before, and the site says so.

Outcome

A charity that operated for ten years without a public front door has one. Card statements read the organization's name, the processor and its fee are disclosed, and the tax letters it sends are ones it can defend. The site launched with claims it can support, including the unflattering ones, and the rejected figures are kept in the codebase as a post-mortem rather than quietly deleted.

The rule we took from it: treat any figure arriving inside a design handoff as illustrative until verified. Generated copy is fluent, and fluency reads as sourcing. Publishing an unverifiable number is not fraud, but it puts your credibility on a claim you cannot defend to the one donor who asks, or worse, tells the person you exist to serve something false about their own rights.