Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Feedback Week: Unexpressed Desires

No, that’s not the title of the latest Nicholas Sparks novel. It’s your donors’ existence if you aren’t actively soliciting feedback. For every complaint an organization hears, there are another 26 people with a similar complaint who stay silent. This probably rings true in your own life – if you have a bad experience, and […]

Learn More February 13, 2018

Fundraising’s Silver Bullet

Tom just weighed in from summertime New Zealand with the suggestion that we once again take up the important subject of donor service. He accompanied his suggestion with this quote from Seth Godin. “Reactive customer service waits until something is broken. We leave it up to the annoyed customer to go to the trouble of […]

Learn More February 12, 2018

Why “Trust” Matters in Fundraising. And What To Do About It.

The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that trust in the U.S. has suffered the largest-ever-recorded drop in the survey’s history among the general population. Even more troubling, trust among the informed public (that would be our donors) in the U.S. imploded, plunging 23 points to 45, making it now the lowest of the 28 countries surveyed— below […]

Learn More February 9, 2018

Is donor feedback a census or a sample?

You want to find out who is going to be the next president. You don’t talk to every likely (or eligible) voter – too expensive. Instead, you find a representative sample of Americans, ask them and extrapolate, building in error percentage for this extrapolation. This type of sampling is mighty. You can learn what segments […]

Learn More February 8, 2018

Testing Your Donor Identities

Previously on donor identity: It’s good to segment by identity But they must be the right identity/ies There must be meaningful differences among different identities And you must be able to get value by messaging them differently So, how do you know if you get value by messaging differently? You must test. Sorry. I wish […]

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Brainstorming Donor Identities

I’ve been preaching testing donor identities as ways of segmentation your file even in my pre-Agitator days. But here’s a secret: not all donor identities are created equal. Remember that the goal of a good segmentation – including an identity segmentation – is to minimize difference among group members and to maximize difference among different […]

Learn More February 7, 2018