Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Want a good donor experience and better retention? Start with understanding donor identity.

Why do donors give? Seems like a question worth knowing the answer to if you are in the business of trying to affect that giving behavior. One of the main reasons they give has nothing to do with your specific charitable brand but rather, their using your charitable brand to deliver on or otherwise reinforce […]

Learn More December 9, 2015

Does Reason Appeal To Donors?

Most of the advice given to fundraisers — from major gift officers to direct response copywriters — regarding reaching donors properly focuses on emotion. Reaching the heart, not the mind … or at least the heart before the head! And there’s heaps of research on how we humans process experience and information to back up that […]

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Focus for Fundraisers

Here at Agitator Global HQ we get lots and lots of press releases and requests to cover the next new thing. Payment systems. Crowd funding. Infographics. Video campaigns. Etc. Etc. All this ‘new, best thing’ stuff reminds me of those pesky water bugs that scooted across the surface on the lakes and ponds of my […]

Learn More December 8, 2015

Giving #Giving Tuesday A Purpose

Yes, I’m happy that #Giving Tuesday 2015 was a good time for all. What’s not to like about $117 million raised from 700,000 donors? Was it incremental giving or just a re-shuffle of gifts that would otherwise have been made on Monday or Friday? Who knows. I guess we can look at the appropriate comparables […]

Learn More December 7, 2015

The Charity “Membership” Ruse

Imagine you signed up for an annual gym membership in January and paid with a check (or cash for the Mafioso readers). Now further imagine that you also signed up for the gym’s “healthy eating” monthly email. What does the term annual connote to you? What about membership? Would you expect to have the gym […]

Learn More December 4, 2015

On Looking A Gift Horse In The Mouth

It’s been quite a week for watching the philanthropic parade go by — featuring gifts in size from one extreme to another and given through the widest variety of methods and channels in history. From the birth of Baby Max Zuckerberg and her parents’ $45 billion gift in her honor to be used toward “improving […]

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