Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Communicate In The Purple Zone

Yesterday, in The Most Sinister Word In Fundraising, Roger wrote about effective fundraising copywriting and — citing our esteemed colleague, Jeff Brooks — the pernicious ‘I’ word. As he wrote: “This evil word has the negative power to transform your message into one that should be about the donor to one about you and your organization.” Much is written […]

Learn More November 3, 2015

The Most Sinister Word in Fundraising

It’s difficult to realistically imagine many copywriters — or fundraisers who have to double as copywriters — escaping the scourge of the year-end copy review. I’m sure for many the assaults have already begun. But, hopefully, before any fatal damage is done in the review process, you’ll heed this advice from Jeff Brooks. In his […]

Learn More November 2, 2015

Video And Year-End Fundraising Appeals

Because I’m an online video evangelist, I had high hopes when I saw this article headline in Campaigns & Elections: 5 Reasons Video Should Be Part Of Your Year-End Fundraising Campaign. As it turned out, after this broad teaser — fundraising with videos are 41% more likely to reach their fundraising goals — the article basically […]

Learn More October 30, 2015

Direct Mail + Online = Results

While I don’t always agree with everything they say (more on that in a moment), I love the clarity with which MobileCause communicates. And forgive the truism: clear communications starts with clear thinking. MobileCause often communicates via infographics. One that recently caught my attention is titled: The Direct Mail Paradox and how you are losing donors. What fundraiser […]

Learn More October 29, 2015

Fundraising Bravery

Sometimes Professor Adrian Sargeant can be a real pain in the ass. We should all be grateful. This week the mild mannered, empirical-evidence-please scholar and the author of the classic Building Donor Loyalty shed his Clark Kent persona and came out swinging against proposed regulatory efforts by the UK government to gag charities. Regulatory efforts aimed […]

Learn More October 28, 2015

Year-end Priority Setting

When I actually got paid to fundraise, as we swung into the last two months of the year we had to balance two priorities — 1) maximizing year-end fundraising to get the numbers as impressive as possible, and 2) projecting costs and revenue for the coming year to fuel the annual budgeting process. That was hard […]

Learn More October 27, 2015