Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Top Two Retention Killers & What To Do About Them

Chapter 9 of my book, Retention Fundraising: the art and science of keeping your donors for life, focuses on ‘Barriers to Retention’. The top two barriers? The real killers? #1: Silos and #2: False Attribution. Silos. Those who work in organizations with more than one department are familiar with silos. The online personnel do little to […]

Learn More June 17, 2016

Opt-in/Opt-out: Special to UK and EU Readers

[Attention Agitator readers elsewhere in the world: There’s plenty here that applies to you as well, but we’ll do a special opt-in/opt-out feature for you later focusing on opt-in/opt-out for newsletters, unsubscribes, etc.] Regardless of the outcome of next week’s Brexit referendum on whether the UK should stay in or leave the European Union, fundraisers […]

Learn More June 16, 2016

How Effective Is Our Fundraising?

The latest stats from Giving USA might be cause for smug satisfaction. Overall giving in the U.S. reached record highs at $373.25 billion in 2015, up 4.1% from the previous year. This amount covers giving from US-based individuals and institutions to US-based 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations. [I come from the advocacy world and would note that […]

Learn More June 15, 2016

Update On Online Giving

In partnership with Network for Good, the Chronicle of Philanthropy provides a ‘data dashboard’ updated monthly that reports trends in online giving. The dashboard looks only at flows through the Network for Good platform, but that’s nearly two million donations over a rolling year to 31,295 nonprofits. So, not a bad picture of what’s happening […]

Learn More June 14, 2016

Starting Over #1: Where Do We Go From Here?

In announcing this Agitator Starting Over series I posed the fundamental question that will guide this exploration: How would you build a growing, sustainable nonprofit from scratch in today’s fast-changing and challenging environment? Tom and I are thrilled with the outpouring of suggestions and recommendations for the series, and specific proposals that might brighten the […]

Learn More June 13, 2016

On Ignoring Donors Needs and Preferences

In working on the Starting Over series that we’ll launch next week I’ve been fretting, worrying and, frankly damn near exploding with frustration. So please permit me this rant. There’s no question that virtually everyone has an excuse for not changing. Frankly I blame most of this resistance to the idiocy of stingy boards and […]

Learn More June 10, 2016