Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Buy Nick’s Book

Nick has written a practical, helpful, and, yes, fun-to-read book on surviving the complex calamity of diminishing donor numbers, clogged acquisition channels and diminishing retention. It’s titled: The New Nonprofit: Six Models to Raise More Money and Accomplish More Mission. It’s just been released and is ready for your order! I’ve read the book four times […]

Learn More August 22, 2019

Donors At the Break Point

There’s a new trend in customer service – AI-assistance. Companies like Walgreens and AT&T are using your personal data to match you with the right customer services representative. And they are using something called the “break point” to walk right up to, but not over, the line where the customer will leave . They do […]

Learn More August 21, 2019

Fundraisers Abandon Ship

Not only is the nonprofit sector doing a lousy job holding on to donors, we’re apparently equally awful when it comes to retaining nonprofit fundraisers. In a recent survey conducted by The Harris Poll for The Chronicle of Philanthropyand AFP, using a self-selected sample of American and Canadian fundraisers, a whopping 51% of the respondents […]

Learn More August 19, 2019

Direct Mail Isn’t Dead, But Volume As A Strategy Is.

There’s an excellent post by Erica Waasdorp on CharityHowTo detailing how mail is still working for organizations. She highlights how digital is still a small-ish minority of all gifts (we’ve estimated it will hit 25% of gifts by 2084) and how there’s still a high return on direct mail investment for many organizations. We totally […]

Learn More August 16, 2019

BRANDING: The Uniformity Myth

One question we received about our branding discussion is “what about uniformity?” There’s a value, goes the argument, in having things that are sacred in all contexts and channels (beyond the core values of the organization we argued are the point of a brand). And there’s something to be said for being in a different […]

Learn More August 14, 2019

BRANDING: What Happens After Your Rebranding?

Thanks to Agitators around the world for a great discussion on branding last week from Roger’s post and mine. For those looking at a potential rebrand, check out how to attack it with donor focus and what the likely financial impact will be (short answer: not good). When you stack up all this evidence, your […]

Learn More August 12, 2019