Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Going Postal

I live a split existence. Part of my day is devoted to writing copy aimed at defeating Donald Trump and helping the people he harms. The other part is devoted to ferreting out information and insights I hope are of empirical help to you and other Agitator readers. This professional paradox is certainly present when […]

Learn More August 28, 2020

If Money Were a Person

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A dollar bill walks into a bar… Anthropomorphism, that mouthful of a word with onomatopoeia (now we’re just doing a weird flex, Google it) like qualities is when we imbue objects or animals with human qualities. You know, like The Little Engine Who Could or Winnie the Pooh […]

Learn More August 26, 2020

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