Award Winning Blog - Agitator

What’s Your Thanksgiving Story?

Our US readers will spend the next few days in thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to each of you! You’ll be encountering a healthy (?) serving of family and friends, many of whom will want to know the latest about your work and how it’s going. Sure, you could say, “Our online giving is up over its […]

Learn More November 27, 2013

Thank You MailChimp

As this study from email firm MailChimp indicates, a single word in the subject line can make a big difference in open rates. To reach its conclusions, in Choose Your Words Wisely MailChimp studied about 24 billion delivered emails, looking at subject lines composed in the aggregate of approximately 22,000 distinct words. Some findings … […]

Learn More November 26, 2013

Not Any Ring Will Do

Jeff Brooks at Future Fundraising Now strikes a nerve — or maybe the funny bone — with his recent post, Fundraising starts with donors, which in turn links to an article by David Meerman Scott, titled Making stuff up. C’mon, admit it! Anyone running a direct response fundraising program has committed the sin. I’m not […]

Learn More November 25, 2013

Death Of A Hero

This week our community lost a great and largely unsung hero. Michael MacLeod, co-founder and chair of Public Interest Data, Inc (PIDI), died on Wednesday leaving behind his wife Whitney, his daughter Kafi, and a legion of friends and causes whose lives he touched for the better. I don’t use the term ‘hero’ lightly. In […]

Learn More November 22, 2013

Why Start With ‘Why?’

In this TED talk, How Great Leaders Inspire Action, Simon Sinek points us to the power of ‘Why?’ In a nutshell, his argument is that most efforts to lead — to persuade or inspire or attract others to follow or invest in what we are urging — begin at the wrong end of the communications […]

Learn More November 21, 2013

Retention: Eliminating Guesswork

The likelihood of boosting retention in your organization will occur only when fundraisers, communications folks, donor service managers, program officers, CEOs and board members — virtually everyone in the organization — understand why donors stay or leave and what steps the organization can take to assure maximum retention. Getting to the point where you can […]

Learn More November 20, 2013