Every organization has information that lives entirely in one person’s head, or one person’s spreadsheet, and nowhere the public can search. This test finds it in about ten minutes, before it becomes a problem at the worst possible time.
What This Test Checks
This test checks whether a piece of public-facing information, something a stranger might genuinely need, exists anywhere searchable, or only exists because one specific staff member happens to know it or keeps track of it privately. It’s a dependency check, not a performance review of that staff member.
Step 1: List the Questions Only One Person Can Answer Confidently
Picture a volunteer coordinator at a mid-size food bank who keeps a running spreadsheet of open volunteer shifts, updated by hand every week based on emails, phone calls, and conversations at the warehouse. It’s thorough, accurate, and lives entirely on her laptop. Nothing on the food bank’s website reflects it. Anyone who wants to know which shifts are currently open has to call her directly and ask.
Walk through your own organization’s programs and ask, for each one, who would you actually have to call to get the current, accurate answer. If the honest response is a specific person’s name rather than a web page, you’ve found exactly the kind of information this test is looking for.
Step 2: Ask What Happens If That Person Is Out
The spreadsheet works fine as long as the coordinator is reachable. The real test is what happens when she isn’t, out sick, on vacation, or gone for good after taking a new job. A volunteer who wants to help this weekend still calls, gets voicemail, and has no other way to find out whether Saturday’s shift is open.
That’s the actual risk this kind of setup creates: not that the information is wrong, but that its availability depends entirely on one person’s schedule and continued employment, rather than on anything the organization can rely on independently of any single staff member.
Why This Risk Is Easy to Miss
From the coordinator’s own seat, nothing here feels broken. She knows every open shift, answers every call correctly, and takes real pride in keeping the spreadsheet accurate. The system works, every single day, right up until the one day it doesn’t.
That’s also exactly why it’s easy to miss: the gap only becomes visible during the coordinator’s absence, and by then, attention is on covering her workload, not auditing whether the food bank’s website can stand on its own. The risk sits quietly for months or years, invisible on every ordinary day, until one inconvenient week makes it impossible to ignore.
Step 3: Separate Administrative Data From Public Data
Not everything in the coordinator’s spreadsheet needs to go public. Her private notes about which volunteers tend to no-show, or internal scheduling conflicts, are legitimately administrative. But a subset of that same spreadsheet, which shifts are open, what each one involves, how to sign up, is exactly the kind of information a stranger searching “volunteer at a food bank near me” is trying to find.
The test isn’t asking you to publish everything in someone’s working spreadsheet. It’s asking you to separate the columns that are genuinely internal from the ones that are, in practice, public information that’s simply never been treated as such.
What to Do With What You Find
Once you’ve identified a program living this way, the fix is narrower than it sounds: build one simple, always-current page or listing for the public-facing part, current volunteer shifts, program eligibility, application deadlines, and let the coordinator’s private spreadsheet stay exactly as useful as it already is for her own internal tracking.
The two don’t have to be the same document. The public page just needs to reflect the same current information the spreadsheet already contains, so a volunteer’s ability to find an open shift doesn’t depend on whether one specific person happens to answer the phone that day. Chapter 3 of Leap The Nonprofit Discoverability Gap calls this the gap between administrative and public data, information that’s accurate and well-kept, just never converted into something the public can actually search for, and the book is free to read.
FAQ
Does this mean every internal spreadsheet needs to become a public web page?
No. Most of a working spreadsheet is legitimately internal. The test is for identifying the specific rows or columns that a member of the public would actually benefit from finding, and publishing just that part.
What if the information changes too often to keep a web page updated?
A simple page that’s updated weekly, even manually, still beats a spreadsheet nobody outside the organization can see at all. Frequency of updates is a separate problem from whether the information is public in the first place.
How do we know if this is worth fixing for a specific program?
If the honest answer to “who would I call to find out” is a person’s name rather than a web page, and that program serves the public directly, it’s worth fixing.
Who should be responsible for keeping the public version current once it exists?
Whoever already owns the underlying information, in this case the volunteer coordinator, since she’s updating it anyway. The goal is to reuse that existing habit, not create a second job for someone else to maintain a duplicate record.
