Award Winning Blog - Agitator

When the Close Up Image Doesn’t Work

Hopeful or sad for your appeal? It sounds like a practical choice, which is probably why it sticks around. But it pushes into the wrong level of thinking by assuming emotion is a dial you adjust independently as single variable when instead, it’s more of a holistic, gut level reaction. How many appeals are you […]

Learn More March 18, 2026

The Charity Image That Quietly Signals Agency

Same hands, same object being transferred, same charitable context; just a small shift in vertical position. On the left, the donor’s hand sits below the recipient’s, on the right, it’s above. Donors donated more in a split test when the donor’s hand appeared higher in the frame. The reason is straightforward, humans interpret vertical space […]

Learn More March 16, 2026

“Experiencing Homelessness” and Other Ways We Talk Past People

Concrete, precise, and specific language makes donors feel heard. Wharton’s Jonah Berger and York University’s Grant Packard analyzed customer service interactions to understand what moves customer satisfaction. It wasn’t compensation, tone, or empathy training, it was word choice. Increasing linguistic concreteness by one standard deviation improved customer satisfaction by 9% and actual spending by 13%. […]

Learn More March 13, 2026

The Dead Man Who Knows More About Fundraising Than You Do

Let me tell you about Lyman Pierce. He raised the equivalent of $5 billion before anyone had heard of a CRM. He invented the capital campaign, the gift table, the volunteer team structure, and the daily accountability report — then in 1940 he died and was largely forgotten. HOWEVER…he left behind a fundraising manual that […]

Learn More March 11, 2026

The Middle Is Crowded

In 1929, economist Harold Hotelling described the “principle of minimum differentiation.” Competing stores, given the same information and the same incentives, rationally locate next to each other. If customers are spread along a street, the profit-maximizing position is the center. The goal is to minimize average distance to the largest number of buyers. Picture a […]

Learn More March 9, 2026

Why Your Best Copy Starts With Silence

George Orwell wrote “Politics and the English Language” in 1946. One line from it should hang over every fundraising shop in the country: “Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not […]

Learn More March 6, 2026