Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The Case for More Abstraction in Fundraising

People give to achieve a goal and reinforce their values. Those goals and values differ based on the subconscious Identity “hat” the donor is wearing (e.g. Globalist when considering a gift to UNICEF, Conservationist when giving to The Nature Conservancy, Dog lover when giving to the local humane society). But they aren’t really giving to […]

Learn More August 24, 2020

Back to The Future

Marketing scholars had the chance to work with a local chapter of a national health charity. This is their story. The local chapter in Texas had limited funds and internal capacity and despite this, or perhaps because of it, the academics were able to experiment. The academic’s situation analysis revealed the following challenges, An uninformed […]

Learn More August 21, 2020

The Weak-Minded Nonsense of Generational Marketing

One of our most enjoyable and simultaneously painful Don Quixote quests is attacking the windmills of horseshit that are generational marketing and other random segmentation schemes posing as human insight. We’ve cited reams of evidence and data galore undermining the weak-minded nonsense of generational marketing, the clusterf#$% of cluster analysis and personas to nowhere. (Here, […]

Learn More August 19, 2020

How to Move Your Donor Comms Plan From “More” to “Better” in 4 Steps

Imagine, instead of GDPR or opt-in requirements or any of the byzantine rules you may have on who to communicate to and when, the new rule was this: You aren’t allowed to communicate without knowing something meaningful about the person you were writing to? ‘Meaningful’ doesn’t mean a description of what they are, e.g. age, […]

Learn More August 17, 2020

Is Your Donor Angry or Dissatisfied?

Is your donor angry or dissatisfied? Hopefully donor dissatisfaction and anger are rare in your organization though first year retention rates make a pretty strong argument for dissatisfaction being a major concern. Service failures can take many forms – e.g. name spelled wrong, sending too many solicitations, leading donors to wonder if their donation was […]

Learn More August 14, 2020

After 2000 Years, Your Chance to Make Matching Gift History

Today we’re serving a helping of Roman history paired with the an elixir to lift your pandemic depressed spirits by helping an association of fundraisers in New Zealand that’s in dire straits. Over the years we’ve offered up dozens of posts on Matching Gifts – the do’s, don’ts and effective alternatives. But, horror of horrors, […]

Learn More August 12, 2020