Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Who Are You?

The Twenty Statements Test (TST) was created by two social psychologists in the 50s’. Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic but give me the days of low creativity, high literal simplicity in my assessments. The test is nothing more than completing this sentence, “I’m a __________.” 19 times. Kidding, 20, times, c’mon. It’s an interesting self-reflective exercise […]

Learn More May 10, 2024

An Agitator PSA

Just breathe and repeat after me, Our echo chamber likely hyperfocuses on what separates, ignoring what binds At any given point in a day, only 1% of Americans are watching Fox News, CNN or MSNBC Notice anything in this table of most important issues? Lots and lots of similarity. The main differences are between R […]

Learn More May 8, 2024

Chatter vs. Courage: A Rare View of Integrity in Political Fundraising

This morning millions of emails will be waiting in the inboxes of already-annoyed Americans. Two main broods are responsible: Democrats and Republicans. Also, this morning folks in the southeastern part of the US can steel themselves for the tens of billions of noisy cicadas—a double emergence of two different broods—are beginning to pop out of […]

Learn More May 6, 2024

Sham or Lighting Money on Fire?

This is another tilting at windmills post on matching gift offers. Feel free to tune out, everyone else seems to. Cutting to the chase, the 2x, 3x, 10x…match is either a sham or you like lighting money on fire. It’s one or the other. How so? If you can get the same results from a […]

Learn More May 3, 2024

Altruism: The Vanilla Ice Cream of Moral Messaging

People give because they want to help others, feeling a sense of moral obligation or compassion to do so. Said differently, donating is an act of altruism or so the thinking goes. Altruism is like vanilla ice cream: classic, dependable… and utterly plain. And the kicker? If you measure a variety of potential influences on […]

Learn More May 1, 2024

Being Defined As A Donor and More Weak Tea

I’m a dog person and a coffee lover. But being a coffee lover isn’t one of the most important ways I define myself, being a dog person is much more so. This simplistic example illustrates the difference between identity presence, whether one has a certain identity, and identity importance, how central the identity is to […]

Learn More April 29, 2024