Award Winning Blog - Agitator

How’s Your Fundraising Robot Doing?

This Agitator is now back on station following an expedition Down Under to present at the 2016 Conference of the Fundraising Institute of Australia (FIA) and to meet with Tom at The Agitator’s Southern Hemisphere HQ for some conspiratorial back and forth on Agitator goals for the future. I’ll be sharing some of the insights […]

Learn More March 7, 2016

Roger & Tom, Thanks For These ‘Top 10’ Funny Subject Lines

My subject line today incorporates the findings of this recent study of email subject lines reported in Nonprofit Pro. According to the study, the most effective email subject lines have these characteristics: Personalization — we all know what that means. Numbers — the article suggests this is about urgency (e.g., 3 days until our matching gift […]

Learn More March 4, 2016

Time To Report

As we head into March, many fundraisers will be putting together some kind of quarterly report. Maybe it’s just for routine review up the staff chain of command. Maybe it’s higher profile … perhaps for the first Board meeting of the year. Let me ask you … What do they want to know? What was […]

Learn More March 3, 2016

10 Bad Fundraising Decisions

I’m sure most Agitator readers have seen or made some bad fundraising decisions. Think about it … what’s the worst fundraising decision you’ve observed? If you’re lucky, perhaps the one that comes to your mind was an anomaly … a one-off’er. And even better, maybe an important lesson was learned. On the other hand, maybe […]

Learn More March 2, 2016

Measuring Donor Experiences – Part 2

In Part 1 I indicated why measuring specific donor experiences represents such a fundamental shift in mindset for most organizations. However, it’s a shift well worth making because measuring the donor experience at various interaction points — and of course acting on what you learn — is one of the ways a nonprofit can grow. […]

Learn More March 1, 2016

Measuring Donor Experiences – Part 1

Old-fashioned, traditional organizations measure the efficiency of the organization’s own internal actions rather than the effectiveness of how the organization’s actions directed toward the donor actually affect donors’ attitudes. A surprising number of fundraisers fail to understand a basic axiom of the organization-donor relationship: It is the actions an organization takes toward its donors (donor […]

Learn More February 29, 2016