Award Winning Blog - Agitator

TEST RESULTS: External Validators Are Vitally Important–Except When They Aren’t

We’re looking at external validators – seals and such – in our week-long series on how to frame overhead and impact. These validators were the second most important factors to get right, lagging only how overhead is presented (which we covered yesterday) In the DonorVoice study with the DMA Nonprofit Federation, we looked at five […]

Learn More August 22, 2018

TEST RESULTS: Donors Don’t Care How You Spend Your Money. They Care How You Spend Theirs.

It sounds like a semantic difference – after all, if donors are donors, then their money becomes your money. But it makes all the difference in the world. We know that (unfortunately) donors have an aversion to overhead. Take a study from Gneezy et al. They allowed participants to give $100 to either charity: water […]

Learn More August 21, 2018

TEST RESULTS: Donors Care About Their Impact, Not Your Overhead

A significant factor in the donor’s decision to give rests in how s/he answers the question, “how am I going to feel if I make this gift?” So, the job of the fundraiser is to determine how those factors under an organization’s control can be most effectively presented. One major set of issues involve those […]

Learn More August 20, 2018

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall, What’s The Best Mindset of Them All

Some fundraisers believe that donors are born the way they are and little can be done to change them. Others believe that valuable and committed donors aren’t born that way; they have to be created. My experience is that these beliefs are often a mirror reflection of the fundraisers themselves. The “donors are born that […]

Learn More August 17, 2018

When do donors lapse?

Back in May, I argued that you haven’t really acquired a donor until they’ve given permission, information, and/or a second gift. Let’s look at the end of a donor lifecycle – the moment they lapse. That one is easy, you say. We have a business rule that says someone is lapsed after they haven’t given […]

Learn More August 16, 2018

WoW

Soon we’ll enter the “crank-up-for-year-end-giving-and-2019- acquisition -efforts” phase of the year and we’ll have lots to say about key elements of all that. However, let’s not forget that behind all the research, advice, commenting and debate the Agitatorand our readers engage in we’re all participants in a shared and fundamental mission: changing the world. Making […]

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