Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Don’t Forget the Fundraiser’s Most Basic Tool

Most of us spend so much time focusing on the latest research, the latest book, reports of the latest dynamite campaign that we lose sight of the basic tasks essential for long-term success. The result of ignoring these mundane, seemingly boring tasks and sub-tasks is often disastrous. For example, tomorrow we’ll post the results of an […]

Learn More May 30, 2018

Consent Dies in Your Inbox. But There’s Hope.

Let me guess. This month, your inbox looks more or less like mine below. Your turn to guess. How many of these did I give my consent to? How many did I read or even open? My work relates closely to GDPR. Yet I didn’t bother with any of these. As a sector we’ve been […]

Learn More May 25, 2018

Say, who’s the barber here?

There’s a great 1977 Saturday Night Live skit with Steve Martin (transcript here; video here) called Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber. The basic joke of the skit is that regardless of the malady his patient suffers from, Theodoric bleeds the patient (even if the condition is that s/he has been bled too much). When questioned, […]

Learn More May 24, 2018

Agitator Cliff Notes: “Hacking Marketing”

This time, I’m going with a non-fundraising book: Hacking Marketing by Scott Brinker of Chief Marketing Technologist fame. The idea is how to take the lessons from the agile software development movement and apply them to more traditional marketing. In the book, Scott espouses agile marketing values of: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Responding to […]

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Agitator Cliff Notes: “The Why Axis”

Next up is The Why Axis, by Uri Gneezy and John List, two of the community of economists who work on charitable giving. Roger had already covered one item I had noted back in 2013: that 1:1 matches work just as well as 2:1 or 3:1 matches. And I talked about how people give more […]

Learn More May 23, 2018

Agitator Cliff Notes: “Data Driven Nonprofits”

I have a confession to make. I still dog-ear pages. Yes, this goes against my former-library-employee training. No, I don’t leave books open so it breaks their poor spine; I’m not a total monster. Yes, I know I can take pictures of the pages and put them on Evernote or Pocket now. Yes, I can […]

Learn More May 22, 2018