Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Fundraising Miracle

Short-term thinking is by far the greatest enemy of effective fundraising. Signs of this noxious enemy abound. Boards and CFOs afraid to make an acquisition spend that can’t be recovered in a year — or less. CEOs who won’t invest in skill-building and continuing education for fundraising staffs. Fundraisers who persist in using metrics like […]

Learn More March 9, 2016

Check Out Strea.ma

Usually the news about social media is upbeat and urgent — all about the benefits of mastering these tools and networks. Today we have good news and bad regarding social media. The bad news comes in this article: Customer Experience Is Getting Worse. The article looks specifically at whether social media channels, as operated by […]

Learn More March 8, 2016

How’s Your Fundraising Robot Doing?

This Agitator is now back on station following an expedition Down Under to present at the 2016 Conference of the Fundraising Institute of Australia (FIA) and to meet with Tom at The Agitator’s Southern Hemisphere HQ for some conspiratorial back and forth on Agitator goals for the future. I’ll be sharing some of the insights […]

Learn More March 7, 2016

Roger & Tom, Thanks For These ‘Top 10’ Funny Subject Lines

My subject line today incorporates the findings of this recent study of email subject lines reported in Nonprofit Pro. According to the study, the most effective email subject lines have these characteristics: Personalization — we all know what that means. Numbers — the article suggests this is about urgency (e.g., 3 days until our matching gift […]

Learn More March 4, 2016

Time To Report

As we head into March, many fundraisers will be putting together some kind of quarterly report. Maybe it’s just for routine review up the staff chain of command. Maybe it’s higher profile … perhaps for the first Board meeting of the year. Let me ask you … What do they want to know? What was […]

Learn More March 3, 2016

10 Bad Fundraising Decisions

I’m sure most Agitator readers have seen or made some bad fundraising decisions. Think about it … what’s the worst fundraising decision you’ve observed? If you’re lucky, perhaps the one that comes to your mind was an anomaly … a one-off’er. And even better, maybe an important lesson was learned. On the other hand, maybe […]

Learn More March 2, 2016