Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Direct Mail Yields Major Gift Donors

On Monday we reported on the American Cancer Society (ACS) and its project over the past year to re-examine the role of direct mail in its fundraising program. ACS is committed to a sophisticated multi-channel marketing approach, in which direct mail remains a key work horse, and in which the full potential value of each […]

Learn More July 17, 2014

How Valid Is Your Fundraising Yardstick?

In Part 7 of our Barriers to Growth series, I noted that the inability or unwillingness to take a hard and realistic look at an organization’s fundraising potential represents a significant barrier to meaningful growth. Why? Because it’s simply too easy to make excuses and simply say “we’re using best practices” and “we’re doing as […]

Learn More July 16, 2014

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