Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Your Vendor’s Dashboard Does Not Show the Donor’s Day

Yesterday was my lucky day, I received three cold MMS fundraising appeals from three different charities. It was different sender numbers and causes but clearly the same basic machinery: image first text second “STOP to End” matching campaign-looking URLs, And in two cases, the chirpy little “Hi Kevin” that somehow manages to feel less personal […]

Learn More May 22, 2026

Is Your Acquisition Renting the Same Pond?

Fundraising has a vocabulary problem that turns into a measurement problem, which then turns into a strategy problem. First we use a word too loosely, then we build reports around it, then we manage to the report as if the word meant what we hoped it meant. “Acquisition” is one of those words. In most […]

Learn More May 20, 2026

Motion Is Not Progress. Ask Less. Ask Better.

I should confess my bias upfront: for 15 years, I’ve watched Kevin Schulman build DonorVoice from a contrarian idea into one of the most rigorous enterprises in nonprofit fundraising. Plus, he’s a partner in The Agitator and a provocateur in the best sense, He “occasionally” blames me for bringing him into this world of fundraising […]

Learn More May 18, 2026

Are You Necessary or Critical?

Necessary and critical are synonyms but not equal. The former is more neutral, the latter more promotional, market-y. Which one should you use if you’re making a claim? Research from the National Academy of Sciences analyzed over 10 years of grant applications and found that more promotional language increases grant success. The relationship is really […]

Learn More May 15, 2026

Headline: Volunteering is a gateway to giving.

Volunteering as gateway to increased giving, that feels wholesome and easily worthy of a conference keynote slide next to a stock photo of smiling people in matching t-shirts. This headline is from a large, randomized field experiment with nearly 150,000 people connected to a science/environment nonprofit. The charity isn’t named but I infer it’s probably […]

Learn More May 13, 2026

A Field Report From Inside the Storm

Long before he helped launch and edit The Agitator, long before moving to New Zealand, and launching a magazine and newsletter named BayBuzz, Tom Belford spent six years building and running Ted Turner’s Better World Society –the first philanthropic venture aimed at using the then largely untapped power of television for social change. And the […]

Learn More May 11, 2026