Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Do People Give With Heart or Head?

There’s a new meta-analysis in Nature Communications from Matthew Hornsey, Jessica Spence, and Cassandra Chapman that’s worth your time. Cassandra’s work in this area has been consistently thoughtful and this is no different, trying to answer the age old question: do people give from the heart or the head? The short answer is both. The […]

Learn More April 22, 2026

Connection starts where most segmentation stops

If we want real connection, we have to stop pretending generic segmentations are anything but shortcuts. We slice people up by what’s available—age, income, gender, channel, how they transact, etc. But the minute we start grouping by these surface traits, we’ve injected bias. And not just demographic bias, behavioral bias. We’re assuming the thing we’ve […]

Learn More April 20, 2026

Past behavior predicts future behavior, and that’s bad.

Past giving predicts future giving, and that’s where the circular logic of donor understanding begins. It’s like saying, someone is on time because they tend to be punctual. True, but not useful. Yes, past behavior can improve efficiency. But you can efficient your way out of business. What this sector needs is more effectiveness—not just […]

Learn More April 17, 2026

Awareness Isn’t a Funnel, It’s a Filter

Coincidence or serendipity intervened for this follow up to my last post, where I argued saying “trust” and “relevance” isn’t the same as understanding it. On Saturday I came across a real gift, a doctoral researcher shared raw data from a study with real donors across 26 charities that measured relationship and brand concepts from […]

Learn More April 15, 2026

The Best Copy Editor I Ever Had Didn’t Know a Thing About Fundraising

Let me tell you about the best copy editor I ever had. He never wrote a word. Didn’t know what a response rate was. Didn’t care about lift, segmentation, or attribution models. And sure as hell couldn’t spell “multichannel.” His name was Pickle. He died yesterday. He was a Staffy—a gray-blue, muscular little […]

Learn More April 12, 2026

When Privacy Outperforms Exposure in Fundraising

Expose and show the visceral, human part of the need to fuel giving, that seems like a common sector thesis. Show more pain and while we’re at it, show more of the person, their face in fact,the raw emotion of it, making it impossible to ignore and fueling empathy. There’s an intuitive logic to it. […]

Learn More April 10, 2026