Award-Winning Blog


What Kind Of Donors Do You Want?

Some of marketing guru Seth Godin’s blog posts are simply elegant in the way they make such important points. Here’s an example, written about attracting customers … a group that to Godin includes “donors, backers, voters, members, vendors”. He asks: What kind of customers do you want? And offers some possibilities: Price shoppers Loyal Demonstrative […]

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Mother Said …

Dorothy Craver died last night. She was 99 and ¾. She was my Mother. I will miss her lots. I owe her so much. Normally I don’t traffic in personal reminiscence in The Agitator, except to remind Tom of our shared past and our mutual obligations to the future of the nonprofit community. This is […]

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Make Your Donors Feel Appreciated

Editors’ Note: The following is an excerpt from Chapter 18 of Roger’s Retention Fundraising: the new art and science of keeping your donors for life. Available here in paper or e-book versions. What better time than the end of this year and the start of a new year to review — and improve — how […]

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Pavlovian Fundraising

Go ahead online fundraisers. Just treat your donors like commodities. Sheep to be herded. Baah! Baah! I can’t stand Pavlovian fundraising. My definition of Pavlovian fundraising is when the fundraiser uses any device other than the cause or mission itself to generate the gift. The worst offenders are you online fundraisers. Yes, we know devices […]

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It’s So Easy To Just Blast Them Out

‘Tis the height of email fundraising season, as we noted yesterday. And judging from the email I see, most fundraisers are just blasting away, with no apparent effort to use donor information (of course, that assumes you have some!) to target donors with personally relevant messages. “Too damn busy this time of year” I can […]

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Improve Your Email Campaigns

I suppose at this point in December you’ve already pulled out all the stops with respect to your online fundraising. One group I support (maybe having second thoughts!) has already sent me four email appeals as of December 10th. I’m sure more are to follow until I relent and give! So here’s a ‘next year’ […]

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