Award Winning Blog - Agitator

BRANDING: Who Polices the Brand Police?

If you missed Roger’s Friday post on brand, a recent study on brand found that fundraising spending has 87 times the impact on income as brand spend and the best organizations had brand as the servant to fundraising instead of vice versa. It’s not all bad news for brand folks, though. There are two areas […]

Learn More July 29, 2019

BRANDING: Help or Hindrance?

Sooner or later someone connected to your organization, totally devoid of fundraising knowledge (likely a board member or the spouse of one), is going to come back from their summer break with the ‘brilliant idea’– half-baked in the sun and sand—that your organization should be changing its name. Or your logo. Or your tagline. Or your graphics […]

Learn More July 26, 2019

Scarcity Is The New Cool

Last week Jeff Brooks, in his post How scarcity focuses your donors on your fundraising , noted the power of using “scarcity” in fundraising. He cites the “scarcity” that exists in matching gift funds where there’s only a certain amount of money available and only a finite amount of time to meet the match There’s […]

Learn More July 24, 2019

What Comes First?

Once upon a time, YouTube had what they called the Gangnam Style problem. They recommended your next video largely based on the popularity of videos, so engineers joked that if you just left your computer on YouTube long enough, it would play Gangnam Style eventually. (This also dates the problem nicely to 2012-2013.) YouTube retooled […]

Learn More July 22, 2019

My Last Email

No, I’m not about to quit. But, when the message popped up in my inbox from Sen. Amy Klobuchar with the subject line reading “My last email” I initially thought she was throwing in the towel. Not so. She was simply noting that this was her “last email before the first FEC deadline of this […]

Learn More July 19, 2019

A Calculus-free Guide to Lifetime Value

Lifetime value. We’ve talked about how to calculate it, how to simplify the calculation, why to focus on it, how to use it in acquisition, and how and why to segment by it. In short: we are fans. As you will see in this post, it’s a simple way of understanding and adjusting your program, […]

Learn More July 17, 2019