Award Winning Blog - Agitator

GOTV Works…Or Not

There was a field experiment using social pressure mailers that increased voter turnout by around 8 percentage points. That’s a massive lift. But averages, even big lift ones, can hide a lot. Nothing works the same with everybody. There aren’t universal “nudges” or other tactics that apply evenly to all people. To quote the late […]

Learn More August 24, 2026

What If Asking More Trains Donors to Give Less?

Ask more, make more is a very convenient theory of fundraising. At the campaign level, it often appears to work. Send another appeal and money comes back. Add another email and somebody clicks. Drop in an SMS and a few gifts appear. Revenue gets attributed to the contact, the spreadsheet turns green and the volume […]

Learn More August 21, 2026

Do You Have a Plan B for Your Payment Platform?

Here’s a question worth asking at your next staff meeting right after the digital guru finishes bragging about the online revenue numbers: if ActBlue stopped processing your donations tomorrow morning, what exactly would you do? Not what would you do next quarter, once someone convenes a task force. Not after the emergency call where somebody […]

Learn More August 17, 2026

Definitely Bold and Underline Fundraising Copy, Right?

There seems to be an article of faith in direct mail fundraising: bold and underline the important stuff. Do a Google search for fundraising copywriting advice and some version of the same rationale appears again and again. People don’t really read fundraising letters. They skim them. So bolding and underlining tell the donor what matters […]

Learn More August 14, 2026

Does Your Test Know What It’s Testing?

Before you run a fundraising test do you specify what behavior is supposed to change? Is it response rate, average gift, maybe both? If you can’t answer that before the test goes out then that tells you something. That “something” usually shows up in the test results that report on response rate, average gift, revenue, […]

Learn More August 12, 2026

Tolstoy, Attrition and the Myth of the Average Donor

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That is the opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. He then spent more than 800 pages cataloguing the many available routes to domestic misery. Fundraising has adopted its own version of the Tolstoy principle: successful donor relationships all look roughly alike, […]

Learn More August 10, 2026