Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Improving Your (envelope) Open Rates

These direct marketing kids today… what with their emails and their analytics and their Facebooks — they don’t know how hard it used to be. Back in my day, we sent people letters. You couldn’t measure open rates! You’d just see if they sent back their check and hoped they opened it! And the mail […]

Learn More November 25, 2019

Will Your #GivingTuesday Campaign Drown In A Sea of Sameness?

December 3rd marks the seventh anniversary of GivingTuesday which has grown from an idea spawned at the 92ndStreet Y in New York City has grown into a global movement involving thousands of organizations and millions of donors and is now its own organization. So far in its 7 years GivingTuesday’s organizers claim the event has […]

Learn More November 22, 2019

How You Can Tell the Truth With Data

Monday, we talked about how other people lie. Here’s how you can tell the truth – effectively. It’s the last part that’s important. Anyone can present data honestly. But giant wads of data aren’t compelling. This is problematic because there is a war going on. It’s between two types of marketing people: art versus science. […]

Learn More November 20, 2019

How Other People Lie With Data

Not you, of course. You are a moral upright person who wants to paint only the most accurate possible pictures of where you are and where you are going. With the knowledge of statistics comes the responsibility of presenting them effectively. My first nonprofit boss used to say that if you interrogate the data, it […]

Learn More November 18, 2019

Behavioral Science Tips for #GivingTuesday and Year-End

The other day a Tweet from Aimee Vance (@NPOfriend) caught my eye with the question: End of Year Goal Thermometer on the donation page. Yea? Nay? What say ye? The string of replies were all over the lot: “Depends”….”Hard NAY—unless the volunteers/board helping meet the goal have it as part of their culture already. We […]

Learn More November 15, 2019

Conference Slides We Never Need See Again

A colleague had been on a webinar and had to vent: “The webinar was about email marketing tactics and, at the end, they had a bullet point that said: Don’t forget about digital. On an email marketing webinar.” she said. Turns out, that’s not uncommon. There are the bullet points, slides, or even full presentation […]

Learn More November 13, 2019