Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Ethics Awareness Month: The Great Scrape of 2025

In the words of the great singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, “Send money, guns, and lawyers — the shit has hit the fan.” We can safely skip the guns, but the rest feels uncomfortably on-point this October. As The Association of Fundraising Professionalsm (AFP) celebrates Ethics Awareness Month —one of our sector’s largest digital intermediaries, GoFundMe, stands […]

Learn More October 22, 2025

Fundraising in Hard Times: Lessons, Tactics, and Proven Campaigns

Let’s not kid ourselves. We’re in a perfect storm—economically, politically, socially, and institutionally—and it’s testing every organization’s capacity to endure or even survive. Trust is at a low ebb, public confidence is fractured, and for nonprofits, the ground beneath their feet is shifting again. In moments like this, I’m reminded why fundraisers exist in the […]

Learn More October 20, 2025

A/B Tests Pick Flavors, Not Lift

Thought experiment, turn fundraising off for a year – zip, nada, nothing. What happens? Revenue doesn’t hit zero, it decays. Long-time donors still give, some monthly gifts keep running, bequests arrive. That “baseline” money would come in even if you did nothing for a while. Yet, right now, it’s being credited to fundraising performance. Flip […]

Learn More October 17, 2025

The Focus Group Just Got Fired

I ran a lot of focus groups in a prior life and they were the bane of my existence. People told me I was good at moderating. I wasn’t. My “skill” was tolerating the strange theater of it all, the artificial setting, the too-small snacks, and the polite nodding of strangers paid to opine about […]

Learn More October 15, 2025

The Fundraiser’s New World

Columbus Day is a reminder that exploration and curiosity aren’t the same thing. Columbus wasn’t as curious as he was convinced, setting out to prove an idea, not test one. That’s confirmation bias with better PR. One is always better off assuming that your knowledge base could fill a thimble rather than an ocean. Curiosity […]

Learn More October 13, 2025

Ditch the Buzzword Buffet. Come to IWITOT.

You know the type of conference I’m talking about. The ones where the air is thick with buzzwords, the panels are indistinguishable from a CRM onboarding session, and by the second keynote you’re thinking fondly of dental work. IWITOT is not that. For over a decade, SOFII’s “I Wish I’d Thought of That” (IWITOT) has […]

Learn More October 10, 2025