Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Is Your Personalization = N/A?

Three spec sheets, we’ll let you guess which one is ours. The more relevant guess for fundraising, which of these is more likely to match the person reading it – yellow, green or purple? At least the “Personalization: N/A” —isn’t even trying to pretend. The “4CP INKJET” is adopting a fake it until you make approach […]

Learn More June 23, 2025

The Donor Newsletter Is Dead. Long Live The Donor Newsletter.

Tom Ahern’s newsletter just landed in my inbox again. I treat it like a gold-embossed invitation to the attic of good sense and bright ideas. Not dusty. Not precious. Just sharp, useful, and often—like this week—unexpectedly timely. [Subscribe Free here.] This issue, Tom tells the story of Remo, a Twin Cities artist who leans heavily […]

Learn More June 20, 2025

When Everything Is Volume, Nothing Is Value

Economics has long been called the dismal science. Behavioral Economics was the rebellion, a corrective to the fantasy of rational actors making perfectly calculated choices in a frictionless world. The rebels had a point. But they also have their own problems: namely, the replication crisis. Turns out their shiny new hammer sometimes just hits different […]

Learn More June 18, 2025

Donor Trust 2025: The Alarming Data–and What Fundraisers Should Do Now

Once again, the data is in—and once again, too many in our sector are whistling past the graveyard. The newly-released 2025 Donor Trust Report from the BBB Wise Giving Alliance should be a wake-up call. A loud one. The kind with a clanging bell that jolts us out of the comfortable denial we’ve lived in […]

Learn More June 13, 2025

What’s Your EMI Score? And Why It Should Matter to Your Brand

A new study in Nature Human Behaviour analyzed 145 years of U.S. congressional speeches using a linguistic framework called the EMI score, short for Evidence Minus Intuition. Here’s the premise: Language exists on a continuum between two rhetorical styles: Evidence-based: Words like fact, data, proof, reason, research, statistics Intuition-based: Words like feel, believe, opinion, gut, […]

Learn More June 11, 2025

The $30 Copy Change: How Personality-Tuned Messaging Pays

A new study adds to what we’ve been saying and likely rings intuitively true: Tailored messages work better. In four large-scale experiments with nearly 1,800 people, researchers tested tailoring messages in three different ways to match a person’s: Personality Moral values Political ideology They tested matched vs. mismatched and matched vs. generic. In all cases, […]

Learn More June 9, 2025