Award Winning Blog - Agitator

You Fixed the Metric but the Problem Moved

California banned thin plastic grocery bags. The number of those bags fell by roughly 40 million pounds a year. Look only at the checkout counter and the intervention worked beautifully. Shoppers, however, had been using some of those bags again. They lined small trash cans, handled pet waste, and performed the various grubby jobs for […]

Learn More August 3, 2026

Pretty Wins

Fundraising runs on numbers. We collect them, slice them, chart them and eventually put them in front of someone who is expected to make a decision. We like to imagine the data speaks for itself. Alas, it doesn’t. Turns out the chart speaks too, and it has a loud voice. Research across topics, industries, media […]

Learn More July 31, 2026

The People Who Make It Happen

At this year’s Bridge Conference you’ll hear a lot about ideas. The big idea…the winning package…the breakthrough campaign…the creative that beat the control. You’ll hear about data and strategy and of course about artificial intelligence. And about major donors and monthly donors and lapsed donors and donors who gave once in 1997 and might, with […]

Learn More July 29, 2026

Did Your A/B Test Declare a Winner and Still Lose Money?

An A/B test feels scientific because it is. The audience is randomly split, version A beats version B, some runs a stat sig test and voila, everyone gets A from now on. But what about the people that preferred B? A 55% to 45% clear win still leaves plenty of people preferring B and getting […]

Learn More July 27, 2026

Your Donor Is Not a Delivery Truck

Defining donors by channel is a bit like defining me by whether Amazon, USPS, UPS or FedEx delivers my packages. It’s accurate, objective and almost entirely inconsequential to what I bought or why. Calling someone an online donor makes the same mistake. The donor may have seen a piece of mail, passed a billboard, heard […]

Learn More July 24, 2026

Lunch Isn’t Free, Nor is Email

How many of you have read performance reports where the email cost is $0? Does anyone else find zero cost to be silly? A study analyzed 746,426 email solicitations sent to 21,451 online survey panelists over three years. The modeled out 3 possible explanations for attrition: people never permanently disengage people disengage as time passes […]

Learn More July 22, 2026