Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Beware of Psychological Reactance

“Tug on donors’ heartstrings…” “Make them feel pain and sorrow… “ “Guilt them into giving…” “We want donors to feel like giving will bring them closer to God’s heart…” “The quickest route to connection is fear and pain…” “By giving, donors will get relief from their emotional discomfort…” If statements like these characterize your approach […]

Learn More May 4, 2020

An Old New Way of Fundraising

(a.k.a. the redemption of telephone fundraising) Now that Covid-19’s forced us all out of face-face fundraising there’s been a rush to pick up the phone again. It makes sense; the similarities between face-to-face channels and voice-to-voice vastly outweigh the differences. If you can’t talk about why your mission matters on the street, in the mall […]

Learn More May 1, 2020

“The Best Way to Predict the Future Is To Create It.

Who knows whether this pandemic will produce a merely difficult or a truly dreadful future for fundraising. Will the surprisingly strong results many organizations are currently experiencing continue or will they drastically diminish as the economic meltdown predicted by most experts ensues? There’re a hundred variations of this question. At this stage there are no […]

Learn More April 29, 2020

M+R 2020 Online Benchmarks Released

On April 23d, the day the Covid-19 death count reached 50,000 in the U.S., M+R published its 2020 Online Benchmarks. [ You can also find an online session M+R did with NTEN on the study here. ] Although the data were collected before the coronavirus outbreak and the massive tumult and tragedy that’s followed, this […]

Learn More April 27, 2020

How to Get Your Share of the NEW PPP Money

Congress has passed and the president has signaled he’ll sign into law the legislation that makes an additional $321 billion available to small businesses and charities. We offer up some practical suggestions to perhaps help Agitator readers increase your chances of getting money. Because, as it turns out, the money does not flow based on […]

Learn More April 24, 2020

What Makes for Good Fundraising Copy?

At its core, it’s words. Google thinks an email is ‘good’ – meaning they don’t bury it in a spam or promotion or social folder – if it reads like something you’d get from a friend, something that sounds personal and involving based (in part) on the words used. And what about those “personal” and […]

Learn More April 22, 2020