Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Waffle House: The Gold Standard for Fundraisers

One of my perennial Father/Son joys involves the l road trips in my F-150 pickup with son Chris. We play lots of John Haitt’s Drive South and even more of Willie Nelson. We’ve been up and down the East Coast, and all across the country. Mostly these journeys self-certify us as Legit Waffle House Critics […]

Learn More November 16, 2018

How to Lose

Geoffrey: My you chivalric fool… as if the way one fell down mattered. Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters. – The Lion in Winter We have chosen a losing profession. We choose to face down the most powerful. We choose to comfort the poor, one of whose most powerful advocates said […]

Learn More November 14, 2018

Alfred Hitchcock: Nonprofit Fundraiser, Part II

Two years ago, in Part 1, we talked about how Alfred Hitchcock held our rapt attention by having a separate script for the emotional arc of his movies. There’s another Hitchcock idea we can steal to raise more: the MacGuffin. The MacGuffin is the object around which a story revolves, but no one in the […]

Learn More November 12, 2018

Historic Performance of Young Voters

Last week in The Millennial Myth I wondered if younger folks would vote in the U.S. mid-term elections at a greater rate than in the past. The answer is a definite “yes” and was delivered to the Agitator by John Della Volpe, Director of Polling at the Institute of Policcs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. […]

Learn More November 8, 2018

Learn To Say “Thank You”

I’m holding my breath in anticipation of the returns from today’s mid-term elections here in the U.S. I’m not holding my breath in anticipation of the flood of “Thank You’s” I’ll receive from the candidates and campaigns I donated to. “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme”, the political piggies screamed over the past year as they snuffled their way […]

Learn More November 6, 2018

Taking our own medicine

We love feedback. We’ve talked about the levels of feedback: Using it to fix things for individuals Using it to fix your systems Using it to model your donors We’ve talked about how it makes people more likely to like you and how it’s an easy retention win. And we’ve talked about the most common […]

Learn More November 2, 2018