Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Alexa, Please Save a Life

Last Monday, Amazon announced that Echo with Alexa will now allow you to donate to one of 48 charities with voice commands. They also said this list will continue to grow. (Of course it will; Amazon has thousands of charities signed up with their payment info through Amazon Smile.) Some important things to know: You […]

Learn More April 12, 2018

The Ripple Effect – A Large Donation Shows Two Trends at Work

FUNDRAISING BULLETIN! “An enterprise blockchain cryptocurrency company just funded every classroom project request on DonorsChoose.org.” Yes, I realize that half of that sentence wouldn’t have made a bit of sense five years ago. It may not even make full sense now. So let’s break it down. Ripple is the name of the enterprise blockchain solutions […]

Learn More April 11, 2018

Doing Good While Doing Harm

This afternoon Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before a joint session of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on the company’s recent Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, in which personal data from some 50 million ,87million, maybe far far more million users ended up in the hands of an outside research […]

Learn More April 10, 2018

Stuck On the Bottom Line

Why, for nearly six decades, has American philanthropy failed to grow beyond a 2% share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? After all, decade after decade athletes break new records, horses run faster, crop yields bloom with increases and on and on. But since 1970 American philanthropic giving has stayed stuck; the percentage of GDP […]

Learn More April 9, 2018

Segmenting Your Donor Services

Every donor is worthy of respect. After all, not everyone gives of themselves to help others. Every dollar given is a sacrifice. Even if given with not-wholly-pure motives like tax benefits or looking good to others, a dollar to charity is a dollar not spent on the hedonic or the temporary. And yet, for charities, […]

Learn More April 6, 2018

Mayfly marketing

Mayflies wait an entire year waiting to be born. On the day of their birth, they fly off, find a mate, lay eggs, and die. All in one day. This feels like the modern marketing landscape. Our windows of relevance in the media and of opportunity with donors seem so fleeting. I have bad news: […]

Learn More April 5, 2018