Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Testing Your Donor Identities

Previously on donor identity: It’s good to segment by identity But they must be the right identity/ies There must be meaningful differences among different identities And you must be able to get value by messaging them differently So, how do you know if you get value by messaging differently? You must test. Sorry. I wish […]

Learn More February 8, 2018

Brainstorming Donor Identities

I’ve been preaching testing donor identities as ways of segmentation your file even in my pre-Agitator days. But here’s a secret: not all donor identities are created equal. Remember that the goal of a good segmentation – including an identity segmentation – is to minimize difference among group members and to maximize difference among different […]

Learn More February 7, 2018

What Do You Mean When You Say “Segmentation”?

A couple of weeks ago, I stirred things up when arguing that neither demographics nor RFM analysis should be the first point of segmentation for organizations. In the ensuing discussion, it became clear we are talking about different types and levels of segmentation worth exploring. In (approximate) order from least to most sophisticated: Full file […]

Learn More February 6, 2018

Instinct and Conventional Wisdom Are No Longer Enough

A variety of recent news items crossed our desk that bear on what we’ll explore this week –”segmentation”. ITEM: Civil Society in the UK reports in Top Charities See Largest Fall for Voluntary Income in 20 Years that the top 100 charities have recorded their most sustained drop in voluntary contributions in two decades. ITEM: […]

Learn More February 5, 2018

Don’t Just Turn Down The Volume

The TL/DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) version of this week’s posts has been: Volume is not a strategy. Not for retention. Not for net income. And especially not for donor satisfaction. Now the painful truth: Lack of volume is also not a strategy. Cutting volume, as many organizations have done successfully, is a great tactic as […]

Learn More February 2, 2018

Ikea’s lesson for fundraisers

You may have heard that the Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea, passed away this weekend. His legacy is much more than the bookcases in my offices. One of the more obscure parts of an Ikea legacy is a cognitive bias called the Ikea Effect. Side note: you must be ingrained in the popular culture […]

Learn More February 1, 2018