Award-Winning Blog


Duct Tape and Baling Wire

There are some movie scenes for which I’m an absolute sucker in almost any movie: The moment where it looks like the con has failed… but wait! The detective gathers everyone in a room and explains what really happened A good translation gag (e.g., the translator says something different from what the person actually said; […]

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Small Change…Big Tears…Great Advice

Month after month the folks at NextAfter treat us –without charge — to their online library of testing treasures. These are folks in quest of answers to the fundamental question: Why do people give? In fact, they’re obsessed with finding the answer in the digital world.  Their Research Library contains, in their words, “the results […]

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Are We Improving on Silence? Offline Edition

This week, we’ve seen how normal reporting on Facebook and Google advertising is flawed because many of the donations that are directly attributed to advertising would have come in anyway. But there are two important additional implications we haven’t discussed: Conversely, the direct attribution model ignores revenue lifts outside of the direct click, or even […]

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Are We Improving on Silence? Social Advertising Edition

We talked Monday about how it’s difficult to test something versus nothing, how few do it online, and how eBay found their search engine ads weren’t nearly as effective as they’d thought when they ran a pure test (in fact, losing money) because many of those people would have come to their site anyway. It […]

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Are We Improving on Silence? Search Engine Advertising Edition

Let’s say you are doing your first online advertising campaign.  The first terms you advertise in the search engine listing is your organization’s name.  Or the first audience you advertise to on the social networks are the people who are already your fans. This makes perfect sense.  In the land of concentric circles on a […]

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A Christmas Carol, part 2

We at the Agitator have had an exclusive opportunity to talk with one of London’s leading philanthropists, Ebenezer Scrooge.  He talks about his giving patterns, criteria, and where he sees the sector going. NE: Thank you for joining us today.  As I understand it, you started your giving about five years ago. ES: Five years ago […]

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