Award Winning Blog - Agitator

How Dirty Are Your Fingernails?

On rainy weekends one of my simple but rewarding pleasures is pawing through my bookshelves, re-reading direct marketing and fundraising favorites. (Hey, it makes more sense to me than woodworking, stamp collecting or Tweeting.) This exercise not only provokes new insights, it serves to remind me that, for the day at least, I’m not on […]

Learn More August 10, 2017

Are You Quarantining Your Major Donors?

“You’ll never get milk from a cow by sending it a letter.” That’s what my fundraising buddies told me 47 years ago when I left university major gift fundraising to help launch a new, direct mail-driven nonprofit called Common Cause. Sadly, too many development directors, major gift officers and CEOs still feel the same way. It’s […]

Learn More August 9, 2017

Getting Sound Fundraising Advice

I been thinking about the Comments on my post last week, Who’s A Poor Fundraiser To Believe? In it’s most simple reading, the post was taken as reducing sound fundraising to choosing one side or the other of the ‘mail more, mail less’ conundrum. And looked at this way, the appropriate response was, in effect: This […]

Learn More August 8, 2017

Farewell To A Progressive Fundraising Hero

Bill Dodd, a direct response pioneer who helped build some of the great names in progressive advocacy and mentored a generation of fundraisers, died on July 17th. He was 68. Bill will be remembered in our trade for the causes he embraced with his skill, talent and big heart to help them grow. The magazine […]

Learn More August 7, 2017

Are You Making A Difference?

For many people, the value they find in what they do (after the pay raise and reputation gain) is whether they are actually making a difference. Are they improving something — their product, service, work culture, community, the world? It seems like there are two points on the calendar when we tend to reassess such […]

Learn More August 4, 2017

Think AND Simplify?

In another incarnation, I spend a lot of time trying to get farmers to adopt ‘best practises’ that would improve their productivity and profitability while at the same time lessening their environmental footprint. What one sees is that there are basically three groups of farmers and growers out there: The top 20% ‘super farmers’ who […]

Learn More August 3, 2017