Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Because Of You

Here’s one of the best email subject lines to hit my in-box in a long time … What can I add, except to say that, once I opened the email, Charity:Water indeed delivered the right message, in this case a ‘thank you’ to its volunteers, as usual with a video. Tom

Learn More September 9, 2016

When A/B testing gets a D

A few weeks ago, I talked about an A/B test that showed significant results even though there was no difference between A and B, just random chance. But that’s not the biggest challenge with AB testing. Don’t get me wrong, AB testing is better than no testing. We have to keep testing and working to […]

Learn More September 8, 2016

Another Nugget From The Lapsed Donor Mine

We’ve recently had some very informative Agitator posts and commentary from practitioners regarding best approaches to lapsed donors. I don’t want those insights to get lost in the summer doldrums. Start here to review. In particular, I want to draw attention to the Comment of Chip Heartfield, who thankfully shared some hard data on the bequest […]

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Three free Webinars in September 2016

Not only are we humans irrational, but we are irrational in predictable ways, with biases baked into our brains’ operating systems. Behavioral science can get more people to do better things without force or coercion – simply designing better choices can make a big difference. These set of three free Webinars will address how to […]

Learn More September 7, 2016

Limited Seating Webinar: Tapping the Power of Behavioral Science

If you’re really serious about growing your organization, you must focus on answering this one question: Why do donors do what they do? Unless you can empirically answer that question you’ll continue to be stuck with inefficient, scratch-the-surface guesswork, incremental testing to nowhere, and the oxymoron ‘flat-growth’. Today, the answers to this question of ‘why’ […]

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A New Fundraising Classic

This morning the publisher officially released Data Driven Nonprofits, a book I believe will become a classic in our sector. Researched and written by Steve MacLaughlin, Blackbaud’s Director of Analytics, Data Driven Nonprofits is to the ‘science’ of fundraising what Ken Burnett’s Relationship Fundraising is to the ‘art’ of fundraising. This book is long overdue. Or, […]

Learn More September 6, 2016