Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Major Gift Fundraising For Smaller Organizations

Lots of time and money is spent on identifying success factors in major gift fundraising for large organizations. Very little on factors that make a big difference for smaller organizations. Until now. Amy Eisenstein, author of Major Gift Fundraising for Small Shops, has just released a study done in conjunction with Prof. Adrian Sargent, director of […]

Learn More November 10, 2015

Are Your Donors Losing Interest?

Most of the discussion that occurs around the sorry state of donor retention deals with failure on the part of nonprofits to even take notice of their situation. In some cases to even know what to measure, let alone understand how to respond in terms of organization-wide attitude and communication tactics. The underlying assumption is […]

Learn More November 9, 2015

The Fundraising Stupidity of ‘Free’ and Cheap

It never ceases to amaze me how stupid and cheap so many nonprofit CEOs, board members and, yes, even fundraisers can be. The consequences that spring from ignorance about the importance of investing in fundraising and a zealously misplaced focus on ‘cost savings’ yield horror and frustration for staff and almost always result in calamity […]

Learn More November 6, 2015

Neurofundraising

Hey, you laugh. But it won’t be long before a fundraising consultant, probably from Mexico or Poland, comes along who claims they can use neuroscience techniques to fine-tune your fundraising messages to exquisite donor-by-donor perfection. They’re already making this claim in the political arena, according to this fascinating rundown in the NY Times on political campaigns […]

Learn More November 5, 2015

9 Great Tips for #GivingTuesday

December 1st 2015 marks the fourth annual #GivingTuesday. In anticipation of the event this post is divided into: 1) stats on #Giving Tuesday, and 2) some quick and easy tips to prepare for #GivingTuesday. Background and Stats #GivingTuesday is that artificially inseminated day of philanthropy aimed at capturing some of the torrent of consumer spending […]

Learn More November 4, 2015

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