Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Ten Years of Hope, Hype, and Heartburn

I’ve been poking around in the Agitator attic lately—blowing dust off ten years of posts, decks, podcasts, conference swag, industry reports and other artifacts of our beloved trade. Call it fundraising death cleaning. Call it archaeology with spreadsheets. Either way, it’s a look at what mattered to fundraisers back in 2015, and what matters now […]

Learn More July 30, 2025

A New BEAT at DonorVoice: Rethinking Fundraising Measurement

Hi, I’m Jen. I’m new here, the newest employee at DonorVoice. I’ve been helping mission-driven organizations challenge the status quo for nearly two decades. About a year ago, after meeting Kevin and the DonorVoice team serendipitously, Kevin invited me to join DonorVoice. At the time, I wasn’t ready. I stubbornly wanted to prove that I […]

Learn More July 28, 2025

How to Make People Stop Doing Good Things: Ask for Money

Swedes are world-class recyclers, nearly 90% of bottles and cans get returned. It’s a habit and point of civic pride. Then researchers added one small twist to the recycling machines: “Press here to get your deposit.”“Or press here to donate it to charity.” And the moment that donation choice appeared, recycling dropped and the drop persisted. […]

Learn More July 25, 2025

You or We?

Fundraising 101 says to lace copy with you so the donor “feels like the hero.” Nice sentiment until the wrong person reads it and flinches. When people with higher self‑esteem hear “you did it,” they thrive. People with lower self‑esteem do better when they read “we did it.” Simple reason: the right pronoun lets them […]

Learn More July 23, 2025

Do You See the Jets Coming?

I’ve been working in fundraising a long, long time. Long enough to have wrestled with metal addressograph plates to print donors’ names on envelopes. . I’ve seen the shift from carbon paper to cloud drives, from licking stamps to launching SMS campaigns, from typewriters to predictive analytics so sophisticated they can tell you what time […]

Learn More July 21, 2025

Your Conference Room Kills Ideas

Nietzsche said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” He may have been onto something, even if you’re just trying to come up with a better subject line, not the next Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Creativity fuels success, but most ideation sessions are where good ideas go to die as they’re smothered in buzzwords, post-its, […]

Learn More July 18, 2025