Award Winning Blog - Agitator

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 […]

Learn More December 12, 2014

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 […]

Learn More December 11, 2014

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’ […]

Learn More December 10, 2014

Where To Focus Your Fundraising?

Or should I say, on whom? Jeff Brooks at Future Fundraising Now has posted a Jeff classic. No one will ever accuse Jeff of not expressing his opinion! And that’s why Roger and I treasure the guy … a true agitator. In Boomers: the young donors you should be worried about, Jeff takes aim at […]

Learn More December 9, 2014

Better Than ‘Fundraising’

In the course of our recent webinar on “How to Stop Donor Churn Before It Starts” , Kevin Schulman made the statement that “good donor service is a far better way of bringing in money than what most of the direct response world calls ‘fundraising‘. A lot better.” No doubt a lot of webinar participants […]

Learn More December 8, 2014

It’s Giving Friday … Now What?

It’s ‘Giving Friday’ today. Giving Tuesday 2014 is over and judged a raging success. Tuesday’s ‘take’ has been counted: $46 million, up from $28 million last year, according to a first estimate from the Chronicle of Philanthropy. What do we do next? I suggest your #1 priority should be getting a second gift from your […]

Learn More December 5, 2014