Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The Forgotten Skill Of Basic Respect

Yesterday Tom asked, What Fundraising Skills are You Lacking?, and commenced to offer up his preference for metrics-oriented skills as the ‘most important’ while conceding equal importance to qualitative skills like ‘getting serious about planned giving’, ‘better story telling’, and ‘building a retention culture’. The evening before Tom’s post appeared I received a surprising email and […]

Learn More January 13, 2017

How can Oxfam’s new approach to donor control work for you?

On Monday, Oxfam took a new step in Europe with the first ever (that I know of) app allowing donors to control their donations. You can read the full story here. Even if the medium turns out not to be the right one (who knows if we are going to want to make space on […]

Learn More January 12, 2017

What Fundraising Skills Are You Lacking?

I just sent a short article to my daughter, a newbie working at Saatchi & Saatchi. She has a very good intuitive sense of how to go about sizing up the ‘market’ for various brands, products and services, but I’ve gently urged her to match her instincts with a deeper capacity for analytics. So this article […]

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The FACTS About Matching Gifts

In a year-end post, Please Don’t Eat the Poinsettia, I noted that the field of fundraising is filled with lots of myths, aphorisms and the equivalent of ‘old wives tales’. Some are true, some are not, and many persist for which there’s little proof one way or the other. I promised that in 2017 we’d explore some […]

Learn More January 11, 2017

Make Me Smile, Not Smirk

Given that I’m hiding out in New Zealand, I probably received far fewer email fundraising appeals than most Agitator readers during the end-of-the-year bombardment. [In fact, my concealment is working, I can’t recall but one NZ-based charity ‘discovering’ me as an online target (compared to three mail appeals).] Most of what I did receive turned me […]

Learn More January 10, 2017

A Bountiful Reward For Giving Thanks

In November The Agitator reported on a creative alternative to #GivingTuesday called #ThanksGivingTuesday. Organized by Heather McGinness, VP of Advancement at Concordia College-New York, this all-stakeholder event is testament to the power of genuine gratitude, skillful communication, and a mighty respect for donors. I checked back with Heather last week to find out how the bottom […]

Learn More January 9, 2017