Award Winning Blog - Agitator

What If We’re Wrong?

One of the central theses of Agitator | DonorVoice is that the future of fundraising lies in attracting and retaining more and more deeply committed donors. We’ve talked about how the areas of fundraising that are increasing – mid/major giving, planned giving, and recurring donations –are driven by the most committed donors to your organization. […]

Learn More June 14, 2019

The Power and Prison of Defaults

Your mind is lazy. I don’t mean that as an insult – mine is too. All ours are. We humans want to do the minimal amount of thinking and deciding. So unless there’s a good reason, we go for the default value, whether that’s taking the same route to work, eating tacos for Taco Tuesday, […]

Learn More June 12, 2019

Fundraising Loses Exceptional Friend

Most Agitator readers have just lost an exceptional friend of fundraising they didn’t even know about. Marie Burnett died last Thursday, June 6, in London. We fundraisers have lost a talented, joy-filled comrade. Her sons Joe and Charlie Burnett have lost a gregarious, loving, doting, you-add-the-adjective mother. And Ken Burnett has lost a lifelong partner of […]

Learn More June 10, 2019

Donor advised funds, part two

Last week, I talked about the $110 billion treasure trove for nonprofits that is sitting in donor-advised funds (DAFs). And there’s already enough for an update on current events. First, the day after that post, the New York Times reported on a lawsuit that has the potential to change the DAF landscape (thanks to Liz […]

Learn More June 7, 2019

Empathy: the emotion your agency didn’t know to use

Imagine you are a Syrian refugee fleeing your war-torn country. Where would you flee, or would you stay? What would you take with you, limited to what you can carry? What do you feel would be the biggest challenge for you? Could this language trigger empathy and foster inclusion and prosocial behavior? Could this be […]

Learn More June 5, 2019

Become a Cyborg: Increase Your Fundraising Productivity

There’s a vision of AI (Artificial Intelligence) I (jokingly) referenced a few weeks ago: that it is coming to take our jobs and, in extreme Skynet scenarios, our lives. But a more realistic, and optimistic, scenario for the long-term is that we will all be enhanced by technology. Computers are very good at repetitive tasks […]

Learn More June 3, 2019