The $73,000 nobody asked me about

The $73,000 nobody asked me about

"You spent $73,000 on branding while families are waiting for grants."

Nobody has said that to me in those words. A few people have said it with their eyebrows. Either way it's the math, and I'd rather publish it than wait for someone else to.

So here's the whole receipt, in order. Including the part that didn't work.

2024. $3,000.

We were the Gift of Surrogacy Foundation. Run on the side, two grants deep, both restricted to Georgia. We had big dreams and so did the surrogacy field. We wanted and needed to go national. My cousin Elan runs a brand studio called Off Menu, and he donated the work. Six figures of it. He performed interviews and workshops to come up with a strategy and a new brand. The $3,000 we actually paid went to his designer for a logo, icons, and a set of brand guidelines.

What we got for $3,000 wasn't a logo. It was a reason, name that was true to our 10 year vision now clear enough to say out loud in front of a thousand people at a surrogacy conference. The most common thing people said back to me that year was "you have such a clear vision." That doesn't happen without the brand work. In nonprofits, narrative is not a nice-to-have rather a must-have. Because ROI only means something to a donor if the “I” stands for impact, and you can't describe impact you haven't figured out how to articulate the narrative.

That vision became a deck. That deck became our first major gift program for surrogacy professionals. That program raised $272,000.

The nonprofit sector would look at that $3,000 and call it overhead. It was the single highest-returning investment we've made.

2024 to 2026. $48,000.

A website built on those brand guidelines, plus the rails for a chatbot. The chatbot was not vanity. Our own research named three barriers to surrogacy: financial, educational, and stigma. Grants attack the first one. The chatbot was our answer to the other two. A way for intended parents and surrogates to educate themselves at their own pace, from a source with no commercial interest in what they decide.

I still believe in that product. It just wasn't the product to build first.

Two years in, the site was fine. Playful, on-brand, never a conversion engine. Analytics were blunt: we didn't retain a visitor unless they came looking for a grant. Donations generated by that website: zero. The chatbot in beta.

The night I added it up. April 2026 @ 11pm

In bed with my wife (and cofounder) talking about why raising money was about to get harder. I'd spent part of that spring helping a group of attorneys raise $50,000 to fight anti-surrogacy legislation. Got on stage at two conferences to help the room feel the urgency.

The surrogacy field is small. The capacity to give is finite, and right now it is being pulled toward advocacy. That's not a complaint. It's a fact I have to plan around.

Somewhere in that conversation I did the math on what we'd paid our development agency over two years. Almost fifty thousand dollars. Same number as six months of holding the line in Florida.

What I actually regret.

Here's where I'd cut if I could go back. I should have paid $20,000 to build a donation-focused website with Elan and Off Menu from the start. Then I could go to the development agency, scope the chatbot properly, and pay them what the project actually needed over a timeline that made sense. Instead I split a small budget across two goals and constrained a good team into an impossible position. The agency wasn't the problem. I was.

The conversation I almost left out.

The agency is run by a friend. I'm the chair of the board of his nonprofit. They’ve sponsored multiple Soirees. I wrote to him before I told anyone else, because a friend deserves a real conversation and not a formal notice.

I told him the truth. Our most urgent problem isn't a product, it's donor conversion. I told him I got ahead of myself, that the vision was always a full digital platform and I put the cart before the horse. You can't fund public-good infrastructure while you're filling holes in your operating budget. I asked for a pause, not a termination.

He wrote back within the hour. "We're here to support the mission in any way you need it.”

We sang karaoke together until midnight at my 40th birthday a few months later. I'm still on his board. I don't think that outcome says something about how well I handled it. I think it says something about him.

2026. $22,000.

I called Elan and asked what he could do with six months of the budget I'd just stopped spending. He said he'd build us a donation machine. Called his team while we were still on the phone.

$18,000 to his designer, $4,000 to his developer, both at significant discounts. His own work was donated AGAIN. We started to build around one idea we found in 2024 and quietly drifted away from: the donor is the customer. Not because donors matter more than families. Because there are no grants or impact without them.

How I'm keeping score.

I am giving myself six months. Same window I compressed the spending into, and for the first time in four years I'm actually pushing traffic. No matter how good the website, it is a conversion engine that needs to be fed. We are using the $10,000 per month Google Adwords Grant we never touched. Writing a consistent email newsletter with stories like this. Telling the real and raw stories on social media. Blog posts like this one. Everything pointed at a site that was purpose-built with a specific donor in mind.

If all of that still can't convert, the problem isn't design. It's something else entirely. And I'll put that receipt on the table too.