Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Let Donor Needs Drive

Subject. Verb. Object: Who… does what… to whom? More than 75% of the world’s languages start sentences with the subject, leading some anthropologists to believe we may be hardwired for this. At the least, we are hardwired to think of ourselves as the subject of the sentence. We are all our own protagonists. And when […]

Learn More February 8, 2019

The Easy Money is Gone: Overcoming Barriers to Growth

As I noted in the first post of this series —The Easy Money is Gone— a smaller pie and more mouths to feed is a recipe for disaster. And yet, status quo thinking, and activity dominate within organizations. Fortunately, as reflected in the generous and thoughtful comments to that post there is optimism about the future […]

Learn More February 6, 2019

The Easy Money Is Gone

Last week was an especially brutal one for journalism. Gannett, publisher of USA Today and nearly 100 other daily newspapers and close to 1000 weeklies began slashing journalist jobs. This in a cost-cutting move anticipating that a hedge-fund company was planning to buy the company. Some analysts were blunt in their assessment that the cutbacks are designed […]

Learn More February 4, 2019

The Sex Life of Danes and Quid Pro Donor Information

Hopefully, you’re convinced. You’ve seen you get better results when you know and prime your donors’ identities. And you think that creating content for your donors can be a valuable way of acquiring new constituents. But there’s a question at the back of your mind: will people tell you what you want to know? Will they […]

Learn More February 1, 2019

Segmenting By Lifetime Value

Different people are different. Wow. That was a quick blog post. Seth Godin, eat your heart out. “What’s that, Roger?” You think we should talk through the implications of that pity declaration a bit more? OK… Different people are different. Likewise, different donors. Donors vary by preference, channels, identities, and more. Thus, Lifetime Values vary […]

Learn More January 30, 2019

Becoming a Lifetime Value Hedgehog

Isaiah Berlin grouped thinkers into: Hedgehogs: like the hedgehog that has one strategy – curl up into a ball – these thinkers have a single defining idea Foxes: those who go wide and employ a variety of strategies. Sixty-six years of debate later, there’s no definitive argument for which style is better. What I’ll argue, […]

Learn More January 28, 2019