Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Nudging toward donations: a Nobel pursuit

Richard Thaler just won the Nobel Prize in Economics*. This is momentous for two reasons: He is the first economics Nobel Prize winner to have a Bacon number of 2: he was in The Big Short with Ryan Gosling, Marisa Tomei, and Steve Carrell, who were all in Crazy. Stupid. Love. with Kevin Bacon.** It’s continued […]

Learn More October 12, 2017

The Las Vegas Massacre And Fundraising

“All I’ve Seen is a Bed and a Doctor Bill” — Loretta Lynn “Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore” — John Prine Stick with me. This musical tour really is about fundraising. No sooner had the last shots blanketed the horrendous carnage in Las Vegas than the fair and balanced folks at […]

Learn More October 10, 2017

Are You an ATM or a Fundraiser?

We don’t pay nearly enough attention to the issue of disrespect and the horrible price our sector pays for ignoring it or shrugging it off with a “well, that’s the way it is.” Disrespect runs rampant in the nonprofit world. We see it every day, reflected in the actions and attitudes of nonprofit boards, CEOs […]

Learn More October 6, 2017

Pareto was a wuss

Vilfredo Fedrico Damaso Pareto is best known now for the 80/20 rule. He originally said 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population. Now this 80/20 rule is used in healthcare (20% of patients use 80% of resources), criminal justice (20% of criminals, 80% of crimes), income distribution, and so on. And […]

Learn More October 5, 2017

Storytelling In The Digital Age

Even though Tom persuaded me to give up working with cave art and stone tablets when we ‘modernized’ the Agitator offices, we’ve never lost interest in the power and importance of storytelling. It’s just that we now have paper and digital bits and bytes for the all-important fundraising task of tale-telling. Over the years we’ve […]

Learn More September 29, 2017

Gender, generation, or ideology: which segmentation is most valuable?

Segmentation’s goal should be to put similar groups together. You might have a lapsed donor segment, because a male lapsed donor looks more like a female lapsed donor than he looks like a male active donor, for example. This came to mind when I was looking at NonProfit Tech for Good’s Data for Good. This […]

Learn More September 28, 2017