Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Design Your Donor In

The commercial marketing space is full of chatter about getting ‘customer insight’ and understanding the ‘customer experience’ with the brand and its products/services (now termed ‘Cx’). The parallel phenomenon in the nonprofit space is all the chatter about being ‘donor-centric’. I don’t use ‘chatter’ to be disparaging. I’m happy whenever I see marketing and our […]

Learn More March 4, 2015

Top 10 Secrets Of Successful Storytelling

Included in my personal pantheon of great copywriters and curmudgeons is the late, great British copywriter George Smith. In his Tiny Essential of Writing for Fundraising, George offered this observation on the importance of being succinct, relevant and engaging when it comes to storytelling … “This”, says George, “is the age of Bullshit. We live in […]

Learn More March 3, 2015

6 Habits Of Fundraising Excellence, Plus 2

Pamela Barden offered 6 Habits of Fundraising Excellence in an article last week in Fundraising Success. I thought it was a great list, but like all lists, it prompted me to think about whether there was anything I might add. First, her list: Curiosity — questioning and challenging Appreciation of people — donors are not […]

Learn More March 2, 2015

Glass Half Full? Or Half Empty?

All I can conclude is that Roger and I are mediocre communicators. Or terribly unpersuasive. It’s a good thing we’re not prosecuting criminals in court … or car salesmen! Over the past year in particular we’ve published dozens of posts emphasizing the importance of donor retention. Roger’s even published a book on the subject, Retention Fundraising. But at […]

Learn More February 27, 2015

Atonement At The Agitator

We really didn’t plan it this way, but fate intervened wondrously to help reinforce our yesterday’s post on Donor Experience. Our good friend and veteran UK fundraiser Giles Pegram properly and quite publicly noted that his customer experience with yesterday’s Agitator was “negative”. He’s absolutely right. We let him down. We apologize. FORTUNATELY, Giles’ comment […]

Learn More February 26, 2015

Are You Missing Out?

The very morning of the Agitator-DonorVoice Webinar on Understanding and Fixing the Donor Experience, the Center for Media Research issued a Brief titled Customer Experience (CX): Top Strategic Choice for Retail Marketers. In reporting on a study by SDL that you can download here, the Center noted that 89% of the retailers surveyed recognized that […]

Learn More February 25, 2015