Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Headline: Headlines Don’t Matter

The headline from a study of headlines? Headlines don’t matter. This was a study of 141,000 headline A/B tests across 293 newspaper websites with big data, reputtable academics and a research lab whose name suggests it should be making Iron Man suits: the Northwestern Computational Journalism Lab. Their goal? Figure out what makes for a […]

Learn More May 16, 2025

The Checkwriters are Dying. So Are We.

We are not acquiring enough new donors. We are recycling corpses. It’s a quiet truth we all know and don’t say aloud. A whispered secret among fundraisers who still claim acquisition is alive. But look closer. The same two million names, passed from co-op to co-op like a rusted coin. They’re called “responsive,” but that’s […]

Learn More May 14, 2025

Forget Your Perfect Offering: What Two Fundraisers Taught Us About Courage and Craft

Once, when our Canadian readers were children, it’s likely that the voices of the CBC — the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — filled the kitchen as breakfast was prepared. Clear, northern vowels. Unhurried questions. The quiet dignity of a country talking to itself. That voice — their voice — came dangerously close to being silenced. In […]

Learn More May 12, 2025

Any Space Between Your Words?

Copy writing is all about the words. Or is it? What about all the little bits pushed in between? Punctuation usage can tell us a lot about writing style. Which copy looks easier to read? You don’t need to see any of the words to pick the one on the left. If you picked the […]

Learn More May 9, 2025

Experience Is Not Strategy

Magnus Carlsen is one of the greatest chess players of all time and didn’t just master the game, he got bored of it. So he helped popularize Chess960, a version where the back-row pieces are shuffled around. He did this to help players stop their overreliance on memorized openings and forcing them to think, not […]

Learn More May 7, 2025

Silicon Valley, ActBlue, and the Great Unraveling

If irony were rocket fuel, we could launch the James Webb Space Telescope into the next galaxy—or ship Elon Musk to his beloved Mars. How else to explain the spectacle of Silicon Valley billionaires—men, yes, men– whose fortunes were built on science, data, and publicly funded research—now gleefully backing a political regime waging war on […]

Learn More May 5, 2025