Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Would you hire your nonprofit?

Marketing professor Theodore Levitt once remarked that “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” The idea is that you need to sell results, not the product or features. This is why nonprofit marketing gurus talk about having a “you” focus in your nonprofit. When you are talking about your […]

Learn More May 17, 2018

Generating Leads By Combining Identity and Programmatic Outreach

The natural assumption is that most donors to the American Hangnail Society either have hangnails or care about someone who does. Yes, as you can tell, we are anonymizing a disease-focused charity. There is not, to my knowledge, an American Hangnail Society (AHS). (Yet; I’m eagerly awaiting the DRTV spots with dreadful looking cuticle beds.) […]

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Channel vs. Identity: Two Go In; One Comes Out

The words we use shape our thinking. A recent study, for example, showed you can change how people want to stop crime by how you describe it (by more than the divide between Democrats and Republicans). If crime is a “beast preying” on the city, you want more punitive crackdowns. If it’s a “virus infecting” […]

Learn More May 16, 2018

The four words that increased click-through by 42%

“As a medical professional”… That was simple, no? They certainly aren’t the types of words you would usually use to increase click-through, response, and conversion rates. And, alas, they may not work for you. Their power lies in the fact that they are a simple priming of a simple, but relevant, donor identity. The test […]

Learn More May 15, 2018

The Opposite of “More” Is Not “Less”; It’s “Better”

For generations direct response fundraisers have been steering the fundraising car with little more than two controls: the gas pedal and the brake pedal. Want more monthly donors? Invest more money. More prospecting. More F2F. More DRTV. More campaigns to reactivate lapsed sustainers. More. More. Want more net income to “meet the numbers”? Cut back […]

Learn More May 14, 2018

Lousy Boards, Lousy Bosses

Yesterday’s email yielded a field report from the circuit-riding Tom Ahern summarizing the dangers of lousy bosses and boards. . He had just previewed a new training session— Everyone’s a Critic– with an audience drawn from a few universities, the Girl Scouts, some hospital, social services, arts/museums and a hospice. Tom reports that “after two hours the group […]

Learn More May 11, 2018