Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Direct Mail + Online = Results

While I don’t always agree with everything they say (more on that in a moment), I love the clarity with which MobileCause communicates. And forgive the truism: clear communications starts with clear thinking. MobileCause often communicates via infographics. One that recently caught my attention is titled: The Direct Mail Paradox and how you are losing donors. What fundraiser […]

Learn More October 29, 2015

Fundraising Bravery

Sometimes Professor Adrian Sargeant can be a real pain in the ass. We should all be grateful. This week the mild mannered, empirical-evidence-please scholar and the author of the classic Building Donor Loyalty shed his Clark Kent persona and came out swinging against proposed regulatory efforts by the UK government to gag charities. Regulatory efforts aimed […]

Learn More October 28, 2015

Year-end Priority Setting

When I actually got paid to fundraise, as we swung into the last two months of the year we had to balance two priorities — 1) maximizing year-end fundraising to get the numbers as impressive as possible, and 2) projecting costs and revenue for the coming year to fuel the annual budgeting process. That was hard […]

Learn More October 27, 2015

Putting the Donor in Control of Fundraising

Much of what we fundraisers practice and preach will eventually be shown to be wrong or out of date. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, disturbing trends and startling events arise to speed up the re-evaluation and change process. Events like the imposition of new regulatory rules in the U.K. requiring charities to get donors’ permission to […]

Learn More October 26, 2015

6 Giants

Copywriting and direct marketing guru Denny Hatch, himself ranking as a legend in the field, recently listed his ‘6 Giants of the Last 100 Years’, with a brief selection of quotes from each. Amongst this group are the creators of the Book-of-the-Month Club (which my father subscribed to and I credit with inspiring my youthful interest […]

Learn More October 23, 2015

Stop Driving Women Out of Fundraising

There are some questions that simply can’t be answered with words. Action is the only answer On so many levels a key — perhaps the key — question is how do we slow or stop the hemorrhaging of talented fundraisers — particularly women — at a time of desperate and growing need. Make no mistake. […]

Learn More October 22, 2015