Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The Two Fundraising Debates That Keep Missing the Point

Fundraising loves a false tradeoff, actually, it loves two of them. The first is the endless argument about tone – positive versus negative appeals, hope versus fear, dignity versus distress. Every side has examples, benchmarks, and strong opinions, and every side can point to moments when the other clearly failed. The second is the equally […]

Learn More January 14, 2026

Are We Optimizing Tactics Based on Bad Beliefs?

A prior is your starting belief before new evidence shows up and not in some mystical sense but in a practical, operational one. “Ask more, make more.” “Recency is the strongest predictor of giving.” “Brand spend is less valuable than fundraising spend.” These aren’t law, they’re assumptions that once worked well enough to stop being […]

Learn More January 12, 2026

Five Days. Five Years. Same Checks.

Five days after the mob stormed the Capitol on January 6th in 2021—while the broken glass was still being swept up and the flags were still being folded—we posted Funding the Insurrection. Our question then was blunt and unavoidable: Would corporate America keep funding the politicians who tried to overturn a presidential election? Back then, […]

Learn More January 9, 2026

Fundraising Has an Emotion Problem. It’s Not the One You Think.

Fundraising’s relationship with emotion is confused in a very specific way. Everyone agrees emotion matters, but the sector keeps treating emotion as if it were the mechanism rather than the medium. Feel something and people will act, lead with the heart and the money will follow. That framing has produced a lot of copy that […]

Learn More January 7, 2026

Stop Saying “Deliverability.” Start Worrying About “See-Ability”.

For years, our sector acted like email was a clear hallway: hit “send,” it lands, it gets opened, it earns its keep. But today it’s really fog. Nonprofits still talk about deliverability like it’s 2009: “Did it send?” “Did it bounce?” “Did it technically arrive?” But deliverability isn’t the problem. See-ability is: Did a real […]

Learn More January 5, 2026

New Year’s Week Editorial Note

This week’s post is brought to you by an AI-generated image and a calendar technicality. Dec 29 is Kevin’s birthday, which is an extremely convenient excuse for not publishing again. Yes, this is the same Kevin who, as a child, routinely got jobbed with “two-fer” Christmas and birthday – one gift, one card, two obligations […]

Learn More December 29, 2025