Award Winning Blog - Agitator

How Best to Start an Appeal?

Before spreadsheets and sermons, there was the campfire. Across hunter-gatherer societies, storytelling coordinated cooperation, taught norms, and even conferred fitness advantages on skilled storytellers. Camps with more and better storytellers were measurably more cooperative; people preferred to live with them, and storytellers enjoyed higher status and benefits. Story wasn’t decoration, it was currency. A story […]

Learn More September 29, 2025

From Warm Glow to Durable Giving: Identity > Norms

When someone’s identity lines up with your mission, you’re not talking to a segment, you’re talking to a person who’s steeped in the thing. They’ve read, done, experienced, observed. They’re high interest and long-tenured with real-world expertise. What does that mean for messaging? Superficial won’t cut it. These people are looking for more. Match the […]

Learn More September 26, 2025

You Can’t Change the World From Under Your Desk

Let’s say you’re Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company and owner of the ABC television network. You’ve helmed one of the most powerful media companies in the world. You’ve gone toe-to-toe with Trump on the Muslim ban, walked away from his President’s Advisory Council over Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, and […]

Learn More September 24, 2025

The Fundraiser’s Phone Ban

We love tidy levers. Teens are anxious, so ban phones. Revenue is flat, so send more appeals. If the dashboard blips, we pat ourselves on the back. If it doesn’t, we reach for the same lever again. Reality is not that simple. Take the SMART Schools study in The Lancet. Thirty English secondary schools, 1,227 […]

Learn More September 22, 2025

Free Speech Without Courage Is…

Jimmy Kimmel didn’t get frogmarched off stage. No riot cops kicked in the studio lights. He wasn’t arrested, sued, or sanctioned. That would’ve been too obvious. Instead, they just took away the audience. Nexstar, a media monopoly in heat for a $6.2 billion merger, decided Jimmy Kimmel Live! wouldn’t air “for the foreseeable future.” Why? […]

Learn More September 19, 2025

Year-End Appeals Are Never Routine When The Republic Is At Stake

I’ve been digging through advocacy copy I wrote in the early 1970s, when the country was in upheaval. Not exactly like today, but a frighteningly similar era of turmoil, media spectacle, and debates about victimhood and radicalization. Back then, we witnessed a series of violent confrontations between government forces and protesters, prisoners, and activists. The […]

Learn More September 17, 2025