Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Communications Breakdown

It was a rainy weekend where I live, so I spent an inordinate amount of time browsing through YouTube videos. I used to read books. Now I watch videos on an iPad (in a room surrounded by bookshelves, for old-time sake). This background proffered to explain why two of my posts this week (at […]

Learn More July 24, 2017

A Higher Calling

The other day Tom posed the question, Are You a Fundraising Professional?, and answered it by concluding that “If you see your role as facilitating a positive donor experience, then yes, you are.” The morning Tom’s post ran I received news that Jay Love, the co-founder and CEO of Bloomerang, the donor management software firm, is […]

Learn More July 21, 2017

Less contact, more revenue? Some for-profits think so

The nonprofits who have made the decision to mail less frequently must think they are going nuts. Organizations like Union of Concerned Scientists, the U.S. Olympic Committee, and others have seen positive net results by communicating less frequently and with more focus on the donor. Yet I have heard three different people from three different […]

Learn More July 20, 2017

Summer Doldrums Threat #1: Branding

Sooner or later someone in your organization, totally devoid of fundraising knowledge (likely a board member or the spouse of one), is going to come back from their summer break with a ‘brilliant idea’. In fact, over many summers, many ‘brilliant’ ideas have crossed The Agitator’s desks. So, we’ve gone back through the archives and will share some of […]

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Are You A Fundraising Professional?

Be careful before you answer. It might be a trick question. I’m sure all Agitator readers regard themselves as ‘professional’, at least in the sense of making some ongoing, applied effort to be seriously competent — i.e. not regarded as a dilettante. But now consider this passage from a recent blog post by fundraiser extraordinaire, Giles […]

Learn More July 19, 2017

Frequency Of Giving

I was browsing through the interesting ‘dashboard’ on online giving compiled by Network for Good and published monthly by the Chronicle on Philanthropy. The latest update reported 20% more donors and 20.9% more donations in June 2017 over June 2016. My first reaction was … great to see this sizeable bump in the number of […]

Learn More July 18, 2017