Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Fundraising Is a Mirror. What Are You Reflecting?

Look at the image sets. Clean desk or chaos corner? Friendly reminder above the sink or sarcastic passive-aggression? Still life fruit or wild abstraction? Window-gazing calm or crowd-surfing madness? You have a clear favorite in each pair, no struggle, no committee meeting, just instant affinity. That’s personality at work. That’s traits in action. And that […]

Learn More May 23, 2025

Engagement Isn’t What You Think It Is And It’s Probably Not What You’re Measuring

There was a time when “engagement” meant something. A donor was engaged if they cared, felt something, had made a psychological investment. Now? Engagement means…they opened your email or clicked a link or attended a virtual town hall while folding laundry. We turned a mental state into a series of browser events. And worse: we […]

Learn More May 21, 2025

Segmentation: The Five Rules and One Big Red Flag

The only reason to segment your donors is because you think treating them differently will make you more money. But for that to work, your segmentation has to follow five must-have rules: People in the same segment are similar in ways that matter to giving. People in different segments are meaningfully different, again, in ways […]

Learn More May 19, 2025

Headline: Headlines Don’t Matter

The headline from a study of headlines? Headlines don’t matter. This was a study of 141,000 headline A/B tests across 293 newspaper websites with big data, reputtable academics and a research lab whose name suggests it should be making Iron Man suits: the Northwestern Computational Journalism Lab. Their goal? Figure out what makes for a […]

Learn More May 16, 2025

The Checkwriters are Dying. So Are We.

We are not acquiring enough new donors. We are recycling corpses. It’s a quiet truth we all know and don’t say aloud. A whispered secret among fundraisers who still claim acquisition is alive. But look closer. The same two million names, passed from co-op to co-op like a rusted coin. They’re called “responsive,” but that’s […]

Learn More May 14, 2025

Forget Your Perfect Offering: What Two Fundraisers Taught Us About Courage and Craft

Once, when our Canadian readers were children, it’s likely that the voices of the CBC — the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — filled the kitchen as breakfast was prepared. Clear, northern vowels. Unhurried questions. The quiet dignity of a country talking to itself. That voice — their voice — came dangerously close to being silenced. In […]

Learn More May 12, 2025