Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The Power of Celebrity (or lack thereof)

in our board meeting bingo run-through of the things you don’t want to hear your board say, I forgot “let’s reach out to X celebrity to see if they will market for us.” (Extra bonus points if X is Oprah.) It comes up frequently. And it’s painful to have to say “yes, it would be great […]

Learn More October 11, 2019

“Smug” Is A Four-Letter Word

We talk about falling retention rates when the reports from the Blackbaud Institute Index or the Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP) is released each quarter. We don’t talk about how many poor fundraising practices contributed to that decline. We talk about the declining overall number of donors, not how fundraising malpractice contributed to the failure to […]

Learn More October 9, 2019

Testing Goes To Pot

Last year, the Journal of the American Medical Association for Internal Medicine published a blockbuster finding – April 20th has a 12% elevated fatal crash risk, which is statistically significant. This doesn’t sound like a blockbuster finding until you factor in that April 20 is also a very unofficial holiday for using marijuana. The authors […]

Learn More October 7, 2019

Head-in-the-Sand Is Not a Donor-Centric Strategy

A year ago I wrote: “ I don’t know exactly when it will happen. In the not-too-distant future your organization will receive a letter from a donor that goes something like this: Dear ABC Organization, I’m growing increasingly concerned over the widespread use and abuse of my private and personal information by organizations like Facebook, Google […]

Learn More October 4, 2019

Shelter from the Privacy Storm

On Monday, Roger talked about the looming storm clouds of California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA.) This new act likely to portend a cluster… munition… for a few reasons: Even before the CCPA takes effect on January 1, 2020, there’s already a push to hold a new California referendum calling for even greater regulation. This on […]

Learn More October 2, 2019

U.S. Privacy Alert

I realize it’s rich in irony to be posting an alert on privacy to readers in an industry that routinely rents and exchanges its donors’ names and addresses to other nonprofits with little or no notice or permission whatsoever in order to create what many donors consider a nuisance. But the time has come for […]

Learn More September 30, 2019