Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Do You Have a Plan B for Your Payment Platform?

Here’s a question worth asking at your next staff meeting right after the digital guru finishes bragging about the online revenue numbers: if ActBlue stopped processing your donations tomorrow morning, what exactly would you do? Not what would you do next quarter, once someone convenes a task force. Not after the emergency call where somebody […]

Learn More August 17, 2026

Definitely Bold and Underline Fundraising Copy, Right?

There seems to be an article of faith in direct mail fundraising: bold and underline the important stuff. Do a Google search for fundraising copywriting advice and some version of the same rationale appears again and again. People don’t really read fundraising letters. They skim them. So bolding and underlining tell the donor what matters […]

Learn More August 14, 2026

Does Your Test Know What It’s Testing?

Before you run a fundraising test do you specify what behavior is supposed to change? Is it response rate, average gift, maybe both? If you can’t answer that before the test goes out then that tells you something. That “something” usually shows up in the test results that report on response rate, average gift, revenue, […]

Learn More August 12, 2026

Tolstoy, Attrition and the Myth of the Average Donor

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That is the opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. He then spent more than 800 pages cataloguing the many available routes to domestic misery. Fundraising has adopted its own version of the Tolstoy principle: successful donor relationships all look roughly alike, […]

Learn More August 10, 2026

Your Database Knows the Gift But Does it Know the Donor?

Your database knows someone gave $43 at 9:17 p.m. after clicking an email on an iPhone. It may also know the campaign, payment method, landing page and which subject line got the click. That is a great deal of information about the transaction and very little about the person. We tend to collect what is […]

Learn More August 7, 2026

Democracy Doesn’t Need Your Talking Points. It Needs Your List.

Somewhere in some nonprofit’s Slack channel right now, someone is drafting talking points on “the erosion of voting rights.” Somebody else is scheduling a panel: Protecting Democracy in the Midterms — A Conversation. Nobody in that channel has yet asked a single supporter to show up as a poll worker on November 3. […]

Learn More August 5, 2026