Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Easy Excuses & Low Expectations — Barriers To Growth, Part 7

I’m convinced that a major barrier to most nonprofits’ growth is that there is little understanding of an organization’s true potential. As a result, far too many organizations and their consultants set their sights far too low, settling for the average given in a benchmark like Giving USA, which year after year, for the past […]

Learn More July 15, 2014

Direct Mail Survives At American Cancer Society

In her recent article in Fundraising Success, Angie Moore updated us on the strategy embarked upon in 2013 by the American Cancer Society. That strategy involved: Stop all direct mail acquisition to generate new direct mail donors for the organization. Stop all direct mail conversion to offer non-direct mail Society donors (online donors, event-participants/donors, information […]

Learn More July 14, 2014

Don’t Treat Them Like They’re Dead!

One of The Agitator’s favorite fundraisers, Mark Phillips at London’s Bluefrog, just posted a gem of an article, as usual. [My apologies to our UK readership for boring you; I assume (hope) all of you read Mark’s Queer Ideas blog religiously.] Mark’s article is about how to handle ‘in-memoriam’ gifts … specifically, how to follow […]

Learn More July 11, 2014

Facebook Furor And Fundraising

Of course the recent furor over the Facebook study on online behavior on its site shows there are limits to how much deception people will tolerate in the name of science. But I fear all that knee-jerk, anti-Facebook reaction does us all a disservice by dampening scientific inquiry. And if any field of human endeavor […]

Learn More July 10, 2014

Fresh Opportunity For Direct Mail Fundraisers

No direct mail isn’t dead. It’s the workhorse, delivering by far the preponderance of individual donations, at least in the US. Still, if you need some encouragement about the future of direct mail, read on. On numerous occasions, The Agitator has urged US fundraisers to shift some focus and resource to the growing Hispanic population. […]

Learn More July 9, 2014

Thank God For These Studies!

If your job is to raise money or to fashion communications designed to move donors, members or supporters to take action, then I have two monumental, ‘stop everything you’re doing’ studies to share with you. Not! The first study was reported by the NY Times with the headline: Donors Give More When They Have a […]

Learn More July 8, 2014