Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Starting Over #2: Switching From Old Rules To New Rules

Why bother even thinking about starting over? What’s wrong with what we’re doing? Everyone else is doing about the same thing, so why bother changing? Failure to ask and correctly answer those key questions is likely to eventually find your organization joining the nonprofit equivalents of Pan Am, Polaroid, Nokia, and Kodak. Once-great organizations that […]

Learn More June 21, 2016

Online Transactions: Less Friction, More Money

Anything that complicates or slows down the online giving process translates into fewer completions and dollars raised. Here’s some real ‘nuts and bolts’ advice you can apply today, before you go to your thirteenth committee meeting on ‘Eliminating silos in our fundraising department’. [Now don’t get me wrong … depending on the size and state […]

Learn More June 20, 2016

Top Two Retention Killers & What To Do About Them

Chapter 9 of my book, Retention Fundraising: the art and science of keeping your donors for life, focuses on ‘Barriers to Retention’. The top two barriers? The real killers? #1: Silos and #2: False Attribution. Silos. Those who work in organizations with more than one department are familiar with silos. The online personnel do little to […]

Learn More June 17, 2016

Opt-in/Opt-out: Special to UK and EU Readers

[Attention Agitator readers elsewhere in the world: There’s plenty here that applies to you as well, but we’ll do a special opt-in/opt-out feature for you later focusing on opt-in/opt-out for newsletters, unsubscribes, etc.] Regardless of the outcome of next week’s Brexit referendum on whether the UK should stay in or leave the European Union, fundraisers […]

Learn More June 16, 2016

How Effective Is Our Fundraising?

The latest stats from Giving USA might be cause for smug satisfaction. Overall giving in the U.S. reached record highs at $373.25 billion in 2015, up 4.1% from the previous year. This amount covers giving from US-based individuals and institutions to US-based 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations. [I come from the advocacy world and would note that […]

Learn More June 15, 2016

Update On Online Giving

In partnership with Network for Good, the Chronicle of Philanthropy provides a ‘data dashboard’ updated monthly that reports trends in online giving. The dashboard looks only at flows through the Network for Good platform, but that’s nearly two million donations over a rolling year to 31,295 nonprofits. So, not a bad picture of what’s happening […]

Learn More June 14, 2016