Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The two common threads of mid, major, monthly, and planning giving donors

As we’ve discussed, major donors are not born. They are neither spontaneously generated nor conceived, immaculately or otherwise. Rather, they come from your existing donor file and supporter rolls. And they exist at the intersection of high commitment to your cause, high ability to give, and high desire to give with a large gift. Neither […]

Learn More May 3, 2019

Understand Your Donors Based on Their Behaviours and Identity

‘If I’d asked my customers what they wanted they’d have said a faster horse.’ widely attributed to Henry Ford In our recent Supporter Journey White Paper, we talked about common insight traps that many fundraisers fall into when planning supporter journeys. We’ve all been seduced by the siren calls of personas, demographic profiling and typing […]

Learn More May 1, 2019

The Power of Wow!

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of visiting Walt Disney World in Florida with my wife and (then) eight-year-old daughter. If I was to describe and score the day, with 10 being highest, it would go something like Waking up super early and getting the kids into the car 5 Queuing for […]

Learn More April 29, 2019

Takeaways From the 2019 M+R Benchmarks Study

Yesterday, on the perfect date, M+R published its 2019 online benchmarking data; it’s well worth a read. Some of the data that jumped out at us: Online giving was close to flat, only up 1%. While this fits with the general “where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?” concerns about overall […]

Learn More April 26, 2019

Premature Exoneration

Nick’s selection of Game of Thrones to illustrate the importance of donor identity, prompts me to seize on the Barr-Trump Exoneration Victory Lap preceding public release of the Mueller Report to spotlight a much overlooked, but fundamentally important problem: the highly likely inaccuracy of address information in your donor list. “How accurate are the donor […]

Learn More April 24, 2019

Watch Your Donors Backwards

In my effort to consume Game of Thrones content pre-finale, I stumbled across a wonderful, nutty, and wonderfully nutty experiment: someone who had never seen the show before watched all the episodes in reverse. At first, it’s superficially interesting: who is this person who jumped out a window? Why did that church explode? What happened […]

Learn More April 22, 2019

Award-Winning Blog

The two common threads of mid, major, monthly, and planning giving donors