Award Winning Blog - Agitator

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

What Do You Want Me To Do?

Too many marketing communications leave the potential respondent asking: “So, what exactly do you want me to do?” Too often the communication takes too long to get to that point (or, in the worst cases, never gets there!), or offers too many choices (overwhelming and confusing — and therefore — paralyzing the prospect), or is […]

Learn More October 31, 2013

Re-Publish: 30 Brilliant Bits Of Online Fundraising Wisdom

NOTE: The Agitator website’s hosting service ‘malfunctioned’ last night, so we’re re-publishing our last post. Sorry about that … and thanks for the alerts we received from readers. Tom & Roger How long have we been raising money online now? I mean, seriously. I guess I would track it back to 1999/2000, when serious software […]

Learn More October 30, 2013