Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Why “Good Messaging” Keeps Underperforming

Jack Trout, a famous ad guy and thinker, famously said: “If your assignment is to change people’s minds, don’t accept the assignment.” He wasn’t being cynical, just precise about where effort is usually wasted. A large randomized experiment on TV advertising and social issues makes his point painfully clear. The study exposed 31,404 voters to […]

Learn More December 19, 2025

Kill Channels. Long Live Channels

Defining donors by channel is a bit like defining me by whether Amazon, USPS, UPS or Fed-Ex delivers my packages. It’s accurate and objective but I rarely make that choice and it’s inconsequential to why I bought what I bought. The channel I give in is often a function of exposure and where I happened […]

Learn More December 17, 2025

Who Loves The Budgeting Process?

Tell me if this rings familiar, You and your team (charity side or agency or combo) create a budget for the upcoming fiscal You rely on historical data to inform projections You discount any prior year, non-recurring anomalies (e.g. big disaster that supercharged fundraising) You do your best Carnac the Magnificent impression and try to […]

Learn More December 15, 2025

AI, Creativity, and Why Most Prompting Advice Misses the Point

If you read enough LinkedIn posts about AI, you’ll come away thinking the game is about clever prompting. Get the “magic words” right and the model unlocks a hidden chamber of brilliance. Get them wrong and it collapses into gibberish. This isn’t how large models actually work, and a new study on visual generative AI […]

Learn More December 12, 2025

AI Chatbots, Donor Questions, and the Quiet Rules That Govern Trust

A new study looked at what happens when a donor on a charity website opens the chat window to ask a few questions before deciding whether to give. The experiment had three moving parts, Sometimes the responses came from a human donor care agent identified as such Sometimes they came from an AI chatbot clearly […]

Learn More December 10, 2025

Batman, Attention, and Why Your Serious Fundraising Is Quietly Invisible

A woman with a prosthetic pregnancy belly boards a crowded train. Researchers recorded how many people gave up a seat. In the control condition, it is just her and an observer. In the experimental condition, everything is identical except a second experimenter, dressed recognizably as Batman, boards from another door and stands a few meters […]

Learn More December 8, 2025