Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Scarcity Is The New Cool

Last week Jeff Brooks, in his post How scarcity focuses your donors on your fundraising , noted the power of using “scarcity” in fundraising. He cites the “scarcity” that exists in matching gift funds where there’s only a certain amount of money available and only a finite amount of time to meet the match There’s […]

Learn More July 24, 2019

What Comes First?

Once upon a time, YouTube had what they called the Gangnam Style problem. They recommended your next video largely based on the popularity of videos, so engineers joked that if you just left your computer on YouTube long enough, it would play Gangnam Style eventually. (This also dates the problem nicely to 2012-2013.) YouTube retooled […]

Learn More July 22, 2019

My Last Email

No, I’m not about to quit. But, when the message popped up in my inbox from Sen. Amy Klobuchar with the subject line reading “My last email” I initially thought she was throwing in the towel. Not so. She was simply noting that this was her “last email before the first FEC deadline of this […]

Learn More July 19, 2019

A Calculus-free Guide to Lifetime Value

Lifetime value. We’ve talked about how to calculate it, how to simplify the calculation, why to focus on it, how to use it in acquisition, and how and why to segment by it. In short: we are fans. As you will see in this post, it’s a simple way of understanding and adjusting your program, […]

Learn More July 17, 2019

Test of the Month Webinars

A quick one for you… The Nonprofit Alliance is now offering a series of “Test of the Month” webinars. On the third Thursday of every month at noon Eastern/9 AM Pacific, we’ll meet for 30 minutes to discuss fundraising experiments from the scientific literature and/or real-life testing. That’s two days from now, hence the odd […]

Learn More July 16, 2019

The Advocacy of Not Advocating

There is a healthy debate over the role of nonprofits in politics. For traditional 501(c)3s in the United States, part of our charter is that our political efforts will be minimal. Minimal, however, isn’t nothing; many nonprofits are very successful in making political change a part of their mission. Others shy away from politics and […]

Learn More July 15, 2019