Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Your Appeal Outline: Thoughtful Strategy or Random Spasm?

Did you actually plan the outline of your fundraising appeal—or just let it happen to you? We’ve been diagramming appeal structures lately, not to make art but to make a point. Take a look at these two outlines from actual appeals: Same audience and mission, different structure. Which of these seems to follow a more […]

Learn More June 25, 2025

Is Your Personalization = N/A?

Three spec sheets, we’ll let you guess which one is ours. The more relevant guess for fundraising, which of these is more likely to match the person reading it – yellow, green or purple? At least the “Personalization: N/A” —isn’t even trying to pretend. The “4CP INKJET” is adopting a fake it until you make approach […]

Learn More June 23, 2025

The Donor Newsletter Is Dead. Long Live The Donor Newsletter.

Tom Ahern’s newsletter just landed in my inbox again. I treat it like a gold-embossed invitation to the attic of good sense and bright ideas. Not dusty. Not precious. Just sharp, useful, and often—like this week—unexpectedly timely. [Subscribe Free here.] This issue, Tom tells the story of Remo, a Twin Cities artist who leans heavily […]

Learn More June 20, 2025

When Everything Is Volume, Nothing Is Value

Economics has long been called the dismal science. Behavioral Economics was the rebellion, a corrective to the fantasy of rational actors making perfectly calculated choices in a frictionless world. The rebels had a point. But they also have their own problems: namely, the replication crisis. Turns out their shiny new hammer sometimes just hits different […]

Learn More June 18, 2025

Donor Trust 2025: The Alarming Data–and What Fundraisers Should Do Now

Once again, the data is in—and once again, too many in our sector are whistling past the graveyard. The newly-released 2025 Donor Trust Report from the BBB Wise Giving Alliance should be a wake-up call. A loud one. The kind with a clanging bell that jolts us out of the comfortable denial we’ve lived in […]

Learn More June 13, 2025

What’s Your EMI Score? And Why It Should Matter to Your Brand

A new study in Nature Human Behaviour analyzed 145 years of U.S. congressional speeches using a linguistic framework called the EMI score, short for Evidence Minus Intuition. Here’s the premise: Language exists on a continuum between two rhetorical styles: Evidence-based: Words like fact, data, proof, reason, research, statistics Intuition-based: Words like feel, believe, opinion, gut, […]

Learn More June 11, 2025