Award Winning Blog - Agitator

A Higher Calling

The other day Tom posed the question, Are You a Fundraising Professional?, and answered it by concluding that “If you see your role as facilitating a positive donor experience, then yes, you are.” The morning Tom’s post ran I received news that Jay Love, the co-founder and CEO of Bloomerang, the donor management software firm, is […]

Learn More July 21, 2017

Less contact, more revenue? Some for-profits think so

The nonprofits who have made the decision to mail less frequently must think they are going nuts. Organizations like Union of Concerned Scientists, the U.S. Olympic Committee, and others have seen positive net results by communicating less frequently and with more focus on the donor. Yet I have heard three different people from three different […]

Learn More July 20, 2017

Summer Doldrums Threat #1: Branding

Sooner or later someone in your organization, totally devoid of fundraising knowledge (likely a board member or the spouse of one), is going to come back from their summer break with a ‘brilliant idea’. In fact, over many summers, many ‘brilliant’ ideas have crossed The Agitator’s desks. So, we’ve gone back through the archives and will share some of […]

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Are You A Fundraising Professional?

Be careful before you answer. It might be a trick question. I’m sure all Agitator readers regard themselves as ‘professional’, at least in the sense of making some ongoing, applied effort to be seriously competent — i.e. not regarded as a dilettante. But now consider this passage from a recent blog post by fundraiser extraordinaire, Giles […]

Learn More July 19, 2017

Frequency Of Giving

I was browsing through the interesting ‘dashboard’ on online giving compiled by Network for Good and published monthly by the Chronicle on Philanthropy. The latest update reported 20% more donors and 20.9% more donations in June 2017 over June 2016. My first reaction was … great to see this sizeable bump in the number of […]

Learn More July 18, 2017

“We’re Not Like This … Are We?”

Innovation and progress come not from working harder, but by working smarter and taking an axe to the time wasters and the trivial. Most of all, stop focusing on the trivial. If I had a nickel for every hour I’ve witnessed trivial debates over orange vs. blue envelopes, or closed-face vs. window envelopes, I could […]

Learn More July 17, 2017