Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The People Who Make It Happen

At this year’s Bridge Conference you’ll hear a lot about ideas. The big idea…the winning package…the breakthrough campaign…the creative that beat the control. You’ll hear about data and strategy and of course about artificial intelligence. And about major donors and monthly donors and lapsed donors and donors who gave once in 1997 and might, with […]

Learn More July 29, 2026

Did Your A/B Test Declare a Winner and Still Lose Money?

An A/B test feels scientific because it is. The audience is randomly split, version A beats version B, some runs a stat sig test and voila, everyone gets A from now on. But what about the people that preferred B? A 55% to 45% clear win still leaves plenty of people preferring B and getting […]

Learn More July 27, 2026

Your Donor Is Not a Delivery Truck

Defining donors by channel is a bit like defining me by whether Amazon, USPS, UPS or FedEx delivers my packages. It’s accurate, objective and almost entirely inconsequential to what I bought or why. Calling someone an online donor makes the same mistake. The donor may have seen a piece of mail, passed a billboard, heard […]

Learn More July 24, 2026

Lunch Isn’t Free, Nor is Email

How many of you have read performance reports where the email cost is $0? Does anyone else find zero cost to be silly? A study analyzed 746,426 email solicitations sent to 21,451 online survey panelists over three years. The modeled out 3 possible explanations for attrition: people never permanently disengage people disengage as time passes […]

Learn More July 22, 2026

Make Them Look, Then Make Them Leave

One identifiable person, visible need, tight crop, visceral with a direct gaze and set of eyeballs that can follow the donor all the way to the reply device. This seems defensible, more visible suffering creates more attention, more emotion and therefore more giving. But does this neat, tidy advice treat three different behaviors as if […]

Learn More July 17, 2026

Strategy Is Whatever Gets a Row

Does this look familiar? Spring Appeal. Summer Appeal. Fall Appeal. Year End. Then the channels are added underneath. Direct mail, email, digital, phone. This uber common way of organizing the world is a major decision point that was probably decided by default, by habit. What’s the strategic unit? With this approach, it’s the campaign. All the rich […]

Learn More July 15, 2026