Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Are You Growing…Or Just Getting Busier?

Nonprofits love metrics. They collect them the way some folks where I grew up collected souvenir spoons: polished, displayed, and mostly useless in any practical sense. They count: email volume impressions clicks campaign sends open rates ROAS conversion rate “engagement” (a word that means everything and therefore nothing) And if you’re really modern, you’ve got […]

Learn More January 21, 2026

Movements Aren’t Sold, They’re Joined

“Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.” — Martin Luther King Jr. MLK didn’t “increase conversion” by pushing harder, he did it by standing for something so clear, human and morally framed that people wanted in. If your fundraising strategy is built on touchpoints, tactics (premiums, matching gifts), frequency and sprinkles […]

Learn More January 19, 2026

Conservatives from Mercury, Liberals from Pluto?

There is a common assumption in politics and fundraising that conservatives and liberals live in different moral worlds, different values, instincts, languages. It isn’t Venus vs. Mars, it’s more astrologocial miles, Mercury vs. Pluto maybe. The implication is if you want to reach one, you should not sound like the other. That assumption drives a […]

Learn More January 16, 2026

The Two Fundraising Debates That Keep Missing the Point

Fundraising loves a false tradeoff, actually, it loves two of them. The first is the endless argument about tone – positive versus negative appeals, hope versus fear, dignity versus distress. Every side has examples, benchmarks, and strong opinions, and every side can point to moments when the other clearly failed. The second is the equally […]

Learn More January 14, 2026

Are We Optimizing Tactics Based on Bad Beliefs?

A prior is your starting belief before new evidence shows up and not in some mystical sense but in a practical, operational one. “Ask more, make more.” “Recency is the strongest predictor of giving.” “Brand spend is less valuable than fundraising spend.” These aren’t law, they’re assumptions that once worked well enough to stop being […]

Learn More January 12, 2026

Five Days. Five Years. Same Checks.

Five days after the mob stormed the Capitol on January 6th in 2021—while the broken glass was still being swept up and the flags were still being folded—we posted Funding the Insurrection. Our question then was blunt and unavoidable: Would corporate America keep funding the politicians who tried to overturn a presidential election? Back then, […]

Learn More January 9, 2026