Your best digital project keeps dying every two or three years. Here's why.

There's a Facebook Page, an old mailing list, maybe a website — and no one currently at the org can reliably get into any of it.

The cheapest setup is whoever volunteered that afternoon. Accounts get made on personal emails, admin rights follow people out the door, and three years later it's a locked room with no key.

Do the recovery before you design anything. Reclaim access, find every account, close the dead ones, write down who owns what. At SMCC that meant shutting 15+ abandoned pages and rebuilding a junk mailing list before I built a single page.

The treasurer moves away and takes the bank login, the domain, and half your history with them.

Core systems get tied to a person's name instead of a role.

Role-based accounts. president@, secretary@, treasurer@ — not susan.gmail. When a new person steps into the role, they step into the account. SMCC runs 21 of these, board-wide, none tied to anyone's personal inbox.

Too many people can change too many things, and eventually one of them does.

"Admin for convenience" feels like teamwork. It's how you get admin for chaos.

Give people the least access they need. This isn't distrust — it's protecting good people from honest mistakes, and the org from any single one of them.

A well-meaning change breaks something invisible, and you don't find out until it's expensive.

Compliance was living in someone's memory instead of in the files.

Treat your logo like a safety device, not decoration. Branding is infrastructure. I rebuilt it for defense — about five times the work of doing it right the first time.

Every flyer looks like a different organization made it.

You're asking volunteers to remember the rules — fonts, colors, spacing, accessibility — in the moment. They won't, and they shouldn't have to.

Build compliance into the assets, not the people. A locked palette, pre-approved logo files for every use, templates that can't drift off-standard. SMCC's logo lives as a full system — every lockup, tested against all four kinds of color blindness, down to a 32-pixel icon. Nobody has to be careful. It's just hard to be wrong.

You launch the shiny new thing and it sits there.

You built what you think they need instead of the one thing they'll touch every week.

Ship the daily-utility feature first. For SMCC it was the calendar — the most-requested thing. We ran it as two tiers: a private one for operations, a public one for events and rentals. It became the second most-visited page on the whole site.

The mailing list gets bigger and the opens get worse — and now the provider wants money for the privilege.

Everyone treats a big list like a trophy. It's not. Dead contacts drag deliverability down and push you over free-tier limits for no return.

Tend the list like a garden. Prune the people who never open. I kept SMCC under the free ceiling for years by culling non-openers after every sign-up drive. The payoff is real: against a 28.3% nonprofit-average open rate, our sends land at 40, 50, even 56% — with a quarter to a third of openers clicking through. A clean list is why those numbers are high.

Promoting anything means reinventing the wheel, so eventually you stop.

No repeatable process — just one exhausted person making it up each time.

Build an engine, not one-off posts. A timeline (assets ready weeks out, reminders as it nears), sized templates for each platform, one set path across site, email, and social. And it does more than fill seats — when SMCC ran its strategic-plan survey, the newsletter drove it: on two separate sends the survey form was the most-clicked link, over 60% of clicks on the reminder. The engine doesn't just talk to the community; it pulls the community's voice back in. It's also your fastest reliable channel when something urgent hits.

The service that carried you for years changes the deal, and suddenly there's a price tag no one budgeted for.

Free tiers are a loan, not a gift. Vendors lower thresholds and raise prices on their schedule, not yours. (Ours recently dropped its free limit from 500 contacts to 250.)

Plan for the day the free ride ends before the sending gets paused. Assume the price is coming, and put the funding conversation on the table early — not the week it breaks.

You pour effort into what you assume matters, and you're guessing.

Nobody reads the analytics, so the org optimizes for its own assumptions instead of what people actually do.

Read the data — search, on-site, and email — and feed the winners. It also tells you when your people show up (for us, midweek, not weekends) and how (mostly on phones, so build mobile-first). Bonus: you can show a funder exactly how people find you and what they do next.

You build something good, it starts to work, and then leadership turns over and it slowly unravels back to nothing.

This is the one nobody says out loud. Infrastructure needs multiple cycles to mature. Boards run on two or three. If every keeper rotates off when their term ends, the system never gets past its first year or two — it just restarts, forever.

Don't anchor long-term systems to short-term seats. Find the people whose commitment is measured in decades, not terms — the Franks, the quiet lifers, the ones still here in ten years — and put the durable things in their hands. Let the board set direction. Let the long-haul people hold the infrastructure.