Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The Great Telemarketing Comeback

In yesterday’s post, The Great Fundraising Comeback, I opined that in order to meet the future “we will need to start over”. I don’t mean begin from scratch—much of our knowledge and experience will prove durable and improvable– but I do mean we’ll be forced to look at first principles which means challenging virtually every […]

Learn More September 9, 2020

The Great Fundraising Comeback

It takes a mighty big catastrophe to break the stupor of complacency and take a hard, fresh look at the world around us—especially our world of fundraising. Even an event as jolting as the Great Recession of 2008 failed to knock more sense into most nonprofits. Of course we aren’t alone. For nearly 50 years […]

Learn More September 7, 2020

How Do You Find Out Why People Give?

For starters, don’t ask. Asking donors “why” they give tends to produce a lot of rationale or superficial answers. People are able to reliably cite their attitudes and provide insight on their experiences from interactions but rarely do they shed light on the cause of their behavior when directly prompted. A slightly better approach is […]

Learn More September 4, 2020

Are You Fundraising With a Sledgehammer While Looking Out the Rearview Mirror?

What do you know about your donors? Not generalities but specifics about your donors and why they support your cause? One generality common across most groups is that “our donors are older”. The precondition here is that younger people are less likely to stick around (and/or give in first place) than older people. If your […]

Learn More September 2, 2020

Trump’s or Biden’s Convention Speech: Which Was Better?

There are myriad ways to answer that question. We chose to stay above the opining fray and analyzed each speech based on linguistic features using our Copy Optimizer. As a refresher, the Copy Optimizer analyzes parts of speech by tagging each word and using algorithms to ‘dimensionalize” parts of speech on two continuums, Involving vs. […]

Learn More August 31, 2020

Going Postal

I live a split existence. Part of my day is devoted to writing copy aimed at defeating Donald Trump and helping the people he harms. The other part is devoted to ferreting out information and insights I hope are of empirical help to you and other Agitator readers. This professional paradox is certainly present when […]

Learn More August 28, 2020