Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Do You See the Jets Coming?

I’ve been working in fundraising a long, long time. Long enough to have wrestled with metal addressograph plates to print donors’ names on envelopes. . I’ve seen the shift from carbon paper to cloud drives, from licking stamps to launching SMS campaigns, from typewriters to predictive analytics so sophisticated they can tell you what time […]

Learn More July 21, 2025

Your Conference Room Kills Ideas

Nietzsche said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” He may have been onto something, even if you’re just trying to come up with a better subject line, not the next Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Creativity fuels success, but most ideation sessions are where good ideas go to die as they’re smothered in buzzwords, post-its, […]

Learn More July 18, 2025

You Want Strategy From Your Agency? Look for This.

If you’re a nonprofit leader, you probably say this every time you hire an agency or think about hiring one: “We need strategy. We’re tired of the same old playbook.” You want different answers to the same old questions. You want a partner with a point of view. One that doesn’t just build campaigns but […]

Learn More July 16, 2025

Live Aid Turns 40: Does the World Still Care?

Forty years ago on July 13th, nearly two billion people—one out of every three humans alive—tuned in to a global concert called Live Aid. They weren’t clicking “like.” They weren’t doom-scrolling. They weren’t arguing in the comments section. They were watching. They were caring. They were donating. From live stages in Lonon and Philadelphia—in front […]

Learn More July 14, 2025

When Concrete Stories Backfire

Most fundraisers have heard some version of this advice a hundred times: Be concrete, specific, make it tangible, show one child. Speaking of children, I find it useful to act like one (insert joke here) by asking, but why? Why does being concrete sometimes work so well and sometimes fall flat? Here’s what we know. […]

Learn More July 11, 2025

Distance Kills Giving, How to Shrink the Gap

Literal distance, pyschological distance and worse yet, literal + psychological. When a beneficiary is halfway around the world, doesn’t look like me and lives a life I’ll never live the impulse to give gets diluted. Far becomes abstract, and abstract doesn’t open wallets. This is why so much fundraising advice focuses on reducing distance. Show […]

Learn More July 9, 2025