Award Winning Blog - Agitator

RESEARCH UPDATE: Making Your Match Less Bad

I’m temporarily giving up. We’ve talked about how: Lead gifts work better than matches Lead gifts work waaaaaay better than matches when you can use the lead gift to cover overhead per Gneezy and colleagues Challenges also work better than matches Matches only work for active donors – they have no impact or negative impact […]

Learn More September 6, 2018

RESEARCH UPDATE: An Online Test of Donor Preferences

A couple weeks ago, we reported how donors preferred to make their preferences known. We even featured a test from the American Diabetes Association that found that asking a donor’s priority mission area increases revenue by 11.6%. While evangelizing donor preference, I got the question “what about online?” After all, we are taught online to […]

Learn More September 5, 2018

The New Agitator

After 11 years and 3,191 posts The Agitator has a new look and a new address: agitator.thedonorvoice.com, instead of theagitator.net. I’m using this first post on the new site to summarize the changes, additions and, most importantly, the guiding philosophy going forward. Why the Change? We’ve increasingly been drawing on the research, testing and results of pilot […]

Learn More September 4, 2018

YEAR END: One Year Ends; The Next Begins

Hopefully, this week has prepared you for your year-end giving season. You’ll get your communications set and you’ll watch the donations come in. And when, at 10:27 local time, you hit your online giving goal, you will celebrate the New Year in a way that makes you not want to give up until at least […]

Learn More August 31, 2018

Who do you want on your file?

Everyone who wants to be there. There! That was simple! Join us next week when we explain why water feels wet. (It’s a liquid). Yes, it sounds simplistic. But we violate this simple premise by not asking supporters how they would like to get communications from us. This step has a few key benefits: It […]

Learn More August 30, 2018

Year End: Ideal Asking Amounts

Do you really know the best “ask amount” for each donor? Many fundraisers really don’t know. They guess, or resort to traditional, tribal wisdom ask strings like 1X Highest Previous Gift (HPC), 1.5 X HPC, 2 X HPC and Other $_______ The result? They’re often leaving massive amounts of money on the table. The ask […]

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