Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Is the best donor information bought or told?

The TL;DR version: the best information is told. It’s not bought from outside providers nor does it live in a transactional database. But I’m guessing you tuned in for something a bit more in-depth, so there are three big reasons why: The predictive ability of external data is spotty at best. I recently got done […]

Learn More September 21, 2017

Easy is better than hard

Easy things make brains happy. Happy brains do the things we ask them to (like donate). The easier something is, the more it convinces. Simple stocks go up more; simple named people become president. We often forget this. So here’s a simple post about keeping it simple. (The hard data are in links.) Image credit: Boston […]

Learn More September 14, 2017

A Second Chance for Fundraisers

Relationship Fundraising is like teenage sex: Everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it too. Although I’m paraphrasing behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s take on “Big Data” the same insight applies to the much-touted, little-practiced concept of relationship fundraising. It’s […]

Learn More September 13, 2017

Getting your finance department to sign off on restricted giving

Allowing donors to restrict their gifts increases giving, even though very few donors choose to exercise the option. (see for example here and here) This is partly because donors like control of things (see DonorVoice’s Dr. Kiki Koutmeridou discussion of how donor control can get people to opt in here) and partly because the ability […]

Learn More September 7, 2017

What Flood Waters Can’t Conceal

Like millions of folks a good deal of my attention over the past 10 days has focused on the rising waters and the flood of destruction and misery inflicted on the people and animals of Houston by Hurricane Harvey. As we await developments surrounding a potentially fresh disaster– Hurricane Irma now barreling toward the U.S. — […]

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Monthly Giving Part 3- The Great Recordkeeping and Payment Processing Barrier

There’s no question that solid recordkeeping and donor processing systems form an essential foundation for successful monthly giving programs. And, given today’s ready availability of off-the-shelf CRM software and flexible payment processors much-feared complexity of managing monthly giving programs is no longer a valid excuse for jumping in. Before I get to some of options […]

Learn More September 1, 2017