Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Subtract to Boost Donor Engagement?

Addition by subtraction. Less is more. Remove barriers. Mark Twain apologizing for the length of his letter, noting it would have been shorter if he had more time. Leonardo DaVinci defined perfection as when there is nothing left to take away. All these expressions and sentiments can’t hold a candle to our bias for addition […]

Learn More July 26, 2024

Activists Aren’t Donors, Even If They Donate

What makes an activist different from a donor? Too often the former is thought of as a lead-gen, name sourcing exercise to ‘convert’ them to the latter. Activists and donors are different. And while activists often donate that initial act of activism (e.g. the lead-gen petition signing) should not be thought of as a donor […]

Learn More July 24, 2024

Don’t Make Persuasion Even Harder Than It Already Is

Jack Trout was a TV ad man who helped pioneer the brand positioning concept and famously quipped, “If your assignment is to change people’s minds, don’t accept the assignment.” Sage advice. A huge study of TV effectiveness on changing people’s attitudes and beliefs about social issues found it’s a waste of time and money. The […]

Learn More July 19, 2024

Why Are You Waiting?

More than a decade ago before fleeing to New Zealand, Tom Belford, then co-editor of The Agitator dismissed my enthusiasm for a budding new media tool—the Podcast. With a swipe of his keyboard he proclaimed, “Podcasts are the over-hyped Segways of the new media world. They’re for eccentrics […]

Learn More July 17, 2024

From Talk to Action: The ROI of Measuring Donor Experience

You can talk about donor experience but unless you’re regularly measuring it than that’s all it will ever be, talk. But what’s the return on investment? Is it a just-believe thing? Good and no, respectively. These are experimental results comparing asking for feedback after a customer (donor) interaction versus not. The “not” is likely your […]

Learn More July 15, 2024

What’s Better, Ambiguous or Clear?

Do you prefer noisy and ambiguous or clear and explicit? Doubt anyone would say the former but the sector, ironically, relies almost exclusively on the noisy and ambiguous kind of data. The person, Clicked – did they click out of idle curiosity or with intent? Did the context (e.g., time of day or mood) impact […]

Learn More July 12, 2024