Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Cassandra, Chicken Little and Pollyanna

Cassandra says the end is here, can’t you see?! Chicken Little says the sky is falling … it just hit us on the head. Pollyanna says hogwash, everything is fine and will only get better. Most fundraisers appear to be Pollyanna’s. I’m inferring that from the pattern I see in Agitator reader comments to the […]

Learn More October 13, 2014

282 Years Of Annual Giving

Few acts in life are more memorable than tossing a coin into the Trevi Fountain in Rome. I don’t know whether it’s the romance the act promises — the mythical assurance that your coin toss guarantees you a return to Rome — or just the spraying beauty of all that wet Travertine marble chiseled in […]

Learn More October 10, 2014

Donor Sapiens … Extinct Or A Myth?

I just read some great fundraising observations by Francesco Ambrogetti, writing in 101Fundraising. He talks about the extinction of ‘donor sapiens’. Francesco notes that most fundraisers, when they first contemplate what it might take to attract a new donor, seem properly aware that they need to appeal to the emotions. He observes that at that […]

Learn More October 9, 2014

The Trillion Dollar Fundraising Time Bomb

This is an alert for those rare and very adept boards, CEOs and fundraisers who seriously plan beyond the next 36 months. You’re in BIG TROUBLE. Why? Student loans. The smoke alarm hasn’t yet gone off. And it probably won’t for some time. But for those fundraisers who genuinely care about the long-term future, as […]

Learn More October 8, 2014

Is your nonprofit a “watch, observe and guess” organization or a “listen and act” one?

Donor transactional data tells you zero about “Why” something happened. Maybe the sector doesn’t care… All the quantitative data from your website, email marketing tools, direct mail response data….opens, clicks, visits, time on site, response rate, conversion rate, social media shares and on and on and on. Al those reports slicing and dicing and creating […]

Learn More October 7, 2014

Wanted: Retention Superstars

Agitator readers know well how incessantly Roger and I beat the donor retention drum. Heck, Roger’s even written a book on the subject, Retention Fundraising. But sometimes, when you think you’ve said it all, someone comes along and makes an observation that shocks you to attention, forcing you to admit … “I never looked at […]

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