Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Make Them Look, Then Make Them Leave

One identifiable person, visible need, tight crop, visceral with a direct gaze and set of eyeballs that can follow the donor all the way to the reply device. This seems defensible, more visible suffering creates more attention, more emotion and therefore more giving. But does this neat, tidy advice treat three different behaviors as if […]

Learn More July 17, 2026

Strategy Is Whatever Gets a Row

Does this look familiar? Spring Appeal. Summer Appeal. Fall Appeal. Year End. Then the channels are added underneath. Direct mail, email, digital, phone. This uber common way of organizing the world is a major decision point that was probably decided by default, by habit. What’s the strategic unit? With this approach, it’s the campaign. All the rich […]

Learn More July 15, 2026

Donor Horoscopes

I enjoy mocking generational marketing. You know the genre; Boomers are loyal, Millennials want meaning, Gen Z wants authenticity, TikTok, and oat-milk. But that doesn’t mean birth cohort tells us nothing. There are three things that get lazily shoved into the same generational bucket. An age effect is what happens because people get older. Risk-taking tends […]

Learn More July 13, 2026

Refuse the Miracle. Accept the Work.

I’ve read most of the AI-and-fundraising books, white papers and blogs published in the last two years. A depressing number of them are brochures with page numbers — breathless, vendor-adjacent, promising that a chatbot will rescue a donor file nobody bothered to clean. They sell the miracle and skip the work. Steve MacLaughlin’s just-published AI […]

Learn More July 10, 2026

The Fundraising Problem Hiding Inside a Turtle

Would you be more willing to help the spotted owl if the solution saved 10% of its habitat or 50%? Randomized experiments suggest it doesn’t matter much. Now swap out the spotted owl for reptiles and support goes down. Swap in turtles instead of lizards and support goes back up. Your $.50 Scrabble word for […]

Learn More July 8, 2026

Stop Asking for Innovation Then Grading It Like Yesterday’s Mail Plan

“We want creative and innovative ideas.” What tends to accompany this request, though unsaid, is “as long as they feel familiar, fit our current process and come with a track record of success.” This is innovation ordered off the kid’s menu – new idea, but hold the new. The unsaid part reveals itself subconciously through […]

Learn More July 6, 2026