Award Winning Blog - Agitator

#MeToo Moment for Fundraisers

“I had a meeting with the chair of trustees. The meeting did not go well. As we were walking away from the meeting, he put his arm around me and squeezed me to him whilst saying “this would all be so much easier if you were just friendlier, Jane.” “He went to kiss me but […]

Learn More April 16, 2018

Direct Mail is not Yet Dead

We’ve had some fun this week, talking about blockchains and voice-recognition systems and such. None of this matters if you can’t block and tackle with mail. That’s right, mail isn’t dead. And I know you know it isn’t dead. But from some recent discussions with Agitator Nation members, not all our bosses and board members […]

Learn More April 13, 2018

Generation AA – The Battery of Social Change

I made a big mistake; I’d like to remedy it with my blog post today. On our webinar about segmentation last week (which is archived here), Kevin and I argued that demographics are a poor way of segmenting your file. This is because they are not predictive, have far more differences within demographic groups than […]

Learn More April 12, 2018

Alexa, Please Save a Life

Last Monday, Amazon announced that Echo with Alexa will now allow you to donate to one of 48 charities with voice commands. They also said this list will continue to grow. (Of course it will; Amazon has thousands of charities signed up with their payment info through Amazon Smile.) Some important things to know: You […]

Learn More

The Ripple Effect – A Large Donation Shows Two Trends at Work

FUNDRAISING BULLETIN! “An enterprise blockchain cryptocurrency company just funded every classroom project request on DonorsChoose.org.” Yes, I realize that half of that sentence wouldn’t have made a bit of sense five years ago. It may not even make full sense now. So let’s break it down. Ripple is the name of the enterprise blockchain solutions […]

Learn More April 11, 2018

Doing Good While Doing Harm

This afternoon Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before a joint session of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on the company’s recent Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, in which personal data from some 50 million ,87million, maybe far far more million users ended up in the hands of an outside research […]

Learn More April 10, 2018