Award-Winning Blog


2015 Half-time Fundraising Score

The Atlas of Giving, the resource that combines both past results along with forecasts of charitable giving in the U.S., recently issued its 2015 Mid-Year Report. The news is good. Giving in the first half of 2015 was “exceptionally (and unexpectedly) strong—up a total of 7.6% to $238.88 billion compared to $222.03 billion for the same period […]

Learn More

American Cancer Society Flops

If bullshit were the new cure for cancer then the direct marketing staff and consultants of the American Cancer Society should win the Nobel Prize in Medicine hands down. That was pretty much the conclusion of dozens of Agitator readers who phoned, emailed and texted following their attendance at last week’s presentation at the DMANF New […]

Learn More

Innovation Series #5: Ideas Applied

We’ll end this innovation series with some examples of innovation applied. Here’s Tom’s Top 5 Innovative Fundraising Ideas from two years ago. We invite Agitator readers to update the list with your own entries in our Comments section. Thank you. The Editors By Tom Belford   |    September 30, 2013 Today I’m shamelessly exploiting the hard work […]

Learn More

Innovation Series #4: Failure to Innovate

What’s stopping you from innovation. Nothing we can think of except the usual sloth, fear and idiotic board or CEO. Perhaps you can enlighten us. What reasons do you give for failure to innovate? Here’s Tom’s take in his 2012 post Nonprofit Failure is Too Rare.          The Editors   By Tom Belford   |    December 6, […]

Learn More

Innovation Series #3: Exalting the Trivial

A significant barrier to true innovation stems from most nonprofits’ fixation on minutiae that simply doesn’t matter. As part of his 2012 series on Flat Earth Fundraising Roger alerted us to the dangers of Wasting Time by Exalting the Trivial . –The Editors By Roger Craver   |    July 25, 2012   Within hours of our call for […]

Learn More

Innovation Series #2: What Causes Innovation

In this 2nd of our series on “Innovation” drawing from the Agitator vault here’s a post How Does Innovation Occur we wrote eight years ago. Still seems current and if you didn’t read the interview the first time around here’s your second chance. The Editors   Tom and Roger  |    July 2, 2007 Here’s an […]

Learn More