Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Year End: Preparation Potpourri

This week’s series aims at tying content from previous Agitator posts and current research into your preparations for the year-end fundraising season. Our selection is a bit eclectic. At our weekly editorial huddle, we decided to forego the usual year-end checklists available elsewhere. Rather we decided to cover areas that are too often overlooked. For […]

Learn More August 27, 2018

TEST RESULTS: Strengths and Weaknesses of the Identifiable Victim

Stalin said “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” Mother Theresa said “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Both were talking about the idea of scope insensitivity (yes, one to save lives, one […]

Learn More August 24, 2018

Growing your data garden

Places like Facebook are called walled gardens. You can play all you want in the garden while you are there, but everything stays in the garden. From a marketer’s perspective, however, they are more like a Roach Motel: data checks in, but it doesn’t check out. It’s not just Facebook. Try to use the major […]

Learn More August 23, 2018

TEST RESULTS: You Raise More Money When You Listen to Donors’ Preferences

We know that, given the options, many donors would give more if they could direct where their gift went (see, for example, here and here). Yet restricted giving is a giant pain for most fundraisers. You could end up in your finance department explaining yourself for the rest of your natural life (and some of […]

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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