Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Red State, Blue State? Dig Deeper

These two profiles seem like stereotypes or memes for urban/rural, or red state/blue state. This is 3rd party data. It’s big data, it gives us mass market reach as I can know these sorts of things for most people. It’s also entirely correlational, not causal. Having said that, the data are certainly suggestive of two […]

Learn More July 31, 2024

Is Your Work Necessary or Critical?

Necessary and critical are synonyms but not equal. The former is more neutral, the latter more promotional, market-y. Which one should you use if you’re making a claim? Research from the National Academy of Sciences analyzed over 10 years of grant applications and found that more promotional language increases grant success. The relationship is really […]

Learn More July 29, 2024

Subtract to Boost Donor Engagement?

Addition by subtraction. Less is more. Remove barriers. Mark Twain apologizing for the length of his letter, noting it would have been shorter if he had more time. Leonardo DaVinci defined perfection as when there is nothing left to take away. All these expressions and sentiments can’t hold a candle to our bias for addition […]

Learn More July 26, 2024

Activists Aren’t Donors, Even If They Donate

What makes an activist different from a donor? Too often the former is thought of as a lead-gen, name sourcing exercise to ‘convert’ them to the latter. Activists and donors are different. And while activists often donate that initial act of activism (e.g. the lead-gen petition signing) should not be thought of as a donor […]

Learn More July 24, 2024

Don’t Make Persuasion Even Harder Than It Already Is

Jack Trout was a TV ad man who helped pioneer the brand positioning concept and famously quipped, “If your assignment is to change people’s minds, don’t accept the assignment.” Sage advice. A huge study of TV effectiveness on changing people’s attitudes and beliefs about social issues found it’s a waste of time and money. The […]

Learn More July 19, 2024

Why Are You Waiting?

More than a decade ago before fleeing to New Zealand, Tom Belford, then co-editor of The Agitator dismissed my enthusiasm for a budding new media tool—the Podcast. With a swipe of his keyboard he proclaimed, “Podcasts are the over-hyped Segways of the new media world. They’re for eccentrics […]

Learn More July 17, 2024