Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Walk In The Donor’s Shoes

Editor’s Note: This guest post by international fundraiser Francesco Ambroghetti was triggered by our piece, Your Call Is Important To Us. Please Continue To Hold. At last month’s International Fundraising Conference in the Netherlands, participants in a Master Class made calls and online visits to a variety of charities posing as donors attempting to make […]

Learn More November 7, 2013

Snickers Bars And Matching Gifts

Which Matching Gift Challenge formula works best? (A) 1:1 matching grant (“An anonymous donor will match your contribution dollar for dollar.”) (B) 2:1 matching grant (“triples your donation”) (C) 3:1 matching grant (“quadruples your donation”) The anecdotal (as opposed to scientific) ‘rule’ in our trade is that higher match levels are better than lower match […]

Learn More November 6, 2013

Why You?

Imagine that today, by sheer coincidence, you received mail solicitations from two different organizations with international child sponsorship programs, neither of which you presently support. Take off your professional fundraiser’s cap if you can, and explain to me what would happen. Would you open neither, one or both? If neither, are you simply not interested […]

Learn More November 5, 2013

Donor Surveys are Crap. Or Are They?

We here it all the time from people with, as best we can tell, absolutely no background in survey research or quantitative analysis whatsoever. Many of these people mask this lack of knowledge with an often wrong, never in doubt tonality. On the flipside, and in their defense, they have likely come across some really […]

Learn More November 4, 2013

Rules Are Made To Be Broken

Rules are made to be broken! Or are they? A longer version of this aphorism is attributed to General Douglas MacArthur: “Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind.” There are two sides to this. On the one hand, our colleague Kevin Schulman at Donor Voice […]

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‘I’ versus ‘You’

Which is the more effective word in a marketing/fundraising communication — ‘I’ or ‘You’? Our favorite curmudgeon Denny Hatch gives his answer in this rant about a letter he just received as a longstanding and — until then — satisfied customer of Network Solutions. Whenever Denny decides to pick apart a letter, ad or other […]

Learn More November 1, 2013