Award Winning Blog - Agitator

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

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