Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Are You Under- Or Over-Invested in Online Fundraising?

Two recent studies, one from Blackbaud and one from Merkle, put online fundraising’s share of giving in perspective. Merkle, looking at large nonprofits, gave online 15% of the direct response fundraising pie, while Blackbaud, looking more broadly at all charitable giving (with online giving from 5,000+ organizations), gave online fundraising 7.2% of the total charitable giving […]

Learn More March 16, 2017

Your Nonprofit Is Competing With Amazon

What a scary thought! But it’s true. Consider … every month, more people visit Amazon to make a purchase, browse for products or research a product (85%) than visit their families (40%). In fact, nearly 40% visit Amazon one to three times, and close to 30% visit Amazon more than seven times per month. 56% make […]

Learn More March 15, 2017

Embalming The Elephant – Release 1.0

It’s been 16 months since we announced The Agitator Data Liberation Crusade — a quest to make available fundamental data that’s of daily use to fundraisers free of charge or as near-free as possible. Our rationale for this Crusade aimed at benefitting both small and large nonprofits is explained in our post Fundraising Data and […]

Learn More March 14, 2017

How ‘Sustainable’ Is Your Organization?

Once upon a time, the question of the ‘sustainability’ of a nonprofit — the ability to deliver services over a long period — was largely limited to foundations and mega-donors concerned that their funds were being put to long and lasting use. In recent years, the question has migrated to the minds of more and […]

Learn More March 13, 2017

I Give It A ‘B’

Recently I received a Quarterly Impact Report from Possible, a nonprofit providing health care services in Nepal. It’s a modest-sized organization that has treated a bit over 300,000 patients in that one country since 2008. I watch this organization because I’m interested in the challenge of providing quality health care in the most demanding of circumstances. I […]

Learn More March 10, 2017

The Benefits Of Collaborative Fundraising

In Part 8 of The Agitator’s Barriers To Growth series I cited “Insufficient Collaboration” as one of the principal barriers. Of the more than 1 million nonprofits in the U.S., nearly 75% post annual revenues below $500,000. I noted that “this leaves little or no room for the ‘science’ part of fundraising like data analytics, […]

Learn More March 9, 2017