Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Teaching your elephant to dance – Delivery and Discovery

There are significant advantages to being a mature nonprofit brand. You can get very good at delivery, incremental efficiency, and volume. Delivery is about exploiting what we know to get something close to what we expect; it is the origin of efficiency. After all, if you know next year’s acquisition package is going to look […]

Learn More March 15, 2018

The Taxman Cometh, Part 2: Maybe the 2017 Tax Bill Won’t Kill Us All

Since I ended my piece yesterday the doom and gloom note of the existential threat to all philanthropy, this is an odd, or at least paradoxical, piece to write. But there’s some counterbalancing evidence that we may not be peering into the abyss created by the new tax cut law. Hope #1 is that donors […]

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The Taxman Cometh, Part 1: The Downside of the 2017 Tax Bill for Nonprofits

We’ve had a few reader requests to talk about the nonprofit implications of the new tax bill. The trick in meeting this request is that 1) smart people on this issue disagree and 2) I’m not one of the people in #1. So I’ll try to lay out the gloom and doom case today, the […]

Learn More March 14, 2018

What Ask String Works Best?

The life of a direct response fundraiser is filled with so many questions – far more questions than answers. Take the question, “How much should we ask for?” Usually the question is answered with the conventional application of a formula based on previous giving. For example, 1.0X, 1.5X, 2.0X highest previous gift –or some variation […]

Learn More March 13, 2018

Are Your Segmentation Skills a Joke?

IF you depend solely on RFM for your segmentation you’re leaving tons of money on the table. IF you buy into the idea of “personas” created by navel-gazing or demographics (age, gender, income, education) you’ve not only wasted time and money, but you’re leaving even more $, £, € on the table. If you buy […]

Learn More March 12, 2018

Level Three Feedback: Using Feedback to Model

You had an acquisition package that beat your control like the control owed it money. Turns out that putting in a coin and a notepad and address labels and a back-end premium in that package really increased response rate! You have a new control! Fast forward a year. Your donor file isn’t growing the way […]

Learn More March 9, 2018