Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Fitts Law and Your Donor’s Mouse (or Finger)

Paul Fitts, a psychologist from the 50’s realized many errors attributed to human fallacy were, in fact, due to poor design. His studies led to Fitts’s Law, which states that the time it takes to move to a target (like a donation button) depends on the target’s size and its distance from the starting point. […]

Learn More August 21, 2023

AI Insta-Videos

I find myself wondering whether the AI hype train will hurl itself off the tracks or continue laying track and accelerating to the moon. It’s probably both. Put this particular app into the latter category. You can see the watermark, it’s called Pictory.AI. The app’s claim is using AI to convert your long form, text […]

Learn More August 18, 2023

Is That Story Real or Fake?

There’s lots of sector interest in storytelling and making it feel authentic. Is a real story ever fake? If it walks like a fake story and talks like one then the reader will feel it as such, whether it’s “authentic” or not. On the flip side, AI generated stories, which are objectively fake, can feel […]

Learn More August 16, 2023

Use Concrete to Get Unstuck

Concrete, precise and specific words or statements make people feel more heard in donor service domains. Here is a study from Jonah Berger showing the big difference in satisfaction and purchase intent tied to word choice as you move up the concrete scale. In donor service world this equates to raising more money without asking […]

Learn More August 14, 2023

The Answer is 42

We’re in the pre-phase of AI and fundraising. The pre-phase, a concept coined by Kevin Kelly in New Rules for The New Economy, is marked by high hopes and grand ambition. Everyone can and does compete, including lots of non-experts. There will be very few winners and lots of losers along the way. Consider, in […]

Learn More August 11, 2023

How Hard Are You Pulling the Rope?

Is your team – agency, charity, agency + charity – the right size? Bigger isn’t better. There’s a strong tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases. This phenomenon occurs in rope pulling and the workplace, it’s called the Ringlemann effect. Ringlemann measured the […]

Learn More August 9, 2023