Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The Mirage of Ask More = Get More

Fundraising has long run on a seductive idea: if you ask, people give. The logic feels airtight. Send an appeal and some money comes in. Send another and more money arrives. When your job is to hit a revenue target, those numbers on the Excel sheet feel like proof the model works. But it’s a mirage. […]

Learn More September 3, 2025

No Heavy Lifting

In deference to our U.S. readers, who are coping with the official end of summer after a long Labor Day weekend, your dutiful Agitator editors are following suit and taking the day off. Roger and Kevin

Learn More September 1, 2025

When AI Interviews Outperform Humans and What That Means for Fundraising

A large-scale randomized trial in the Philippines compared job applicants interviewed by a disclosed AI voice agent versus a human recruiter. The outcome wasn’t close: 12% more job offers 18% more job starts 17% higher 30-day retention No drop in applicant satisfaction And self-reported discrimination was cut by half under the AI interviewer. The AI’s […]

Learn More August 29, 2025

The Emotional Architecture of Giving

Show need, make it urgent, and never resolve it because if you show hope, you’ve given them a reason not to give. Nonsense. Research looked at nearly 10,000 campaigns across two crowdfunding platforms. The most successful appeals didn’t trap people in despair, they started negative and ended hopeful. On GoFundMe, campaigns that abide by this […]

Learn More August 27, 2025

Why Your Fundraising Test Probably “Won” by Luck & What to Do About It

It’s possible — maybe even likely — that your “winner” in a point-in-time fundraising A/B test didn’t win because of your headline, photo, or copy change. It probably won because of random noise. Before you yell at your screen that I’m an idiot (maybe true, but not for this reason), walk with me through the […]

Learn More August 25, 2025

Monthly Giving: The Lifeline We Keep Ignoring

I’ve been cleaning house. Not the dust and clutter kind, but the harder kind—going through old photos, boxes of files, the decades stacked like cordwood. “Death cleaning”, the Swedes call it. You sit with what you’ve carried, sort through the weight of your working life, and decide what still matters. In the midst of this, […]

Learn More August 22, 2025