Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Your Gift of 16 Minutes

Adrian Sargeant and his crew at the Philanthropy Centre need 16 minutes of your help. Here’s why. They’re undertaking a major study on how best to measure an organiztion’s “philanthropic orientation.” The end product will be a simple questionnaire that you and other organizations can put to work to determine what steps they need to take […]

Learn More July 18, 2018

Finding the Pony in the Charity Commission Report

Didja hear the one about the two kids: one an extreme pessimist, the other an extreme optimist? The parents took the pessimist to a room full of brand-new toys, and the optimist out to a manure pile. When they checked in on the pessimist, he was crying. He wouldn’t play with any of the […]

Learn More July 17, 2018

See Ya Later, Regulator

We know that trust in nonprofits is waning. You can see it in the Edelman Trust Barometer that we talked about in February, along with the reasons why trust is important to fundraising. And last week, the Charity Commission in the UK came out with similar results, showing a drop in trust for UK […]

Learn More July 15, 2018

Just Who Benefits From Volume?

A discussion of incentives in direct marketing wouldn’t be complete without talking about that Agitator bugaboo of communication volume. We’ve pointed out how volume has been poorly tested by those who advocate sending more and more …how organizations have found lower volume works better, and that donors hate it (twice). And… twice we emphasized that volume isn’t […]

Learn More July 13, 2018

Compared to what?

Two polls of Britons came out last fall. One said that only 19% of Britons were willing to pay at least 10 billion pounds in EU “exit fees” as part of Brexit. The other said 29% were willing to pay at least 25 billion pounds. Here’s the weird part: these polls don’t conflict. Rather, both […]

Learn More July 12, 2018

Beware the Mismatched Incentives Between You and Your Canvassing Firm

A few weeks ago, Kevin Schulman here ignited a firestorm by suggesting a F2F model where the canvassing vendor does some or all the financing for this new donor acquisition. There were some well-thought-out concerns about the history of financing acquisition and about the viability in today’s marketing. Regardless of on which side of that […]

Learn More