Award Winning Blog - Agitator

13 Years and Still Explaining Basic Arithmetic to Boards

We’ve been writing about “cost of fundraising” as a deeply flawed metric since we launched The Agitator in 2013. Thirteen years. The argument hasn’t gotten more complicated and too many boards haven’t gotten smarter. Let’s try one more time. The Metric That Rewards Shrinking Cost of fundraising — expressed as cents raised per dollar spent, […]

Learn More May 27, 2026

Memorial Day: What We Owe the Young

Look at any cemetery on Memorial Day, and you see a quiet sea of stone. But look closer, and you see the true weight of the day: it is a holiday paid for almost entirely by the young. For older generations, these rows of white markers evoke a sacred era of collective duty—a time […]

Learn More May 25, 2026

Your Vendor’s Dashboard Does Not Show the Donor’s Day

Yesterday was my lucky day, I received three cold MMS fundraising appeals from three different charities. It was different sender numbers and causes but clearly the same basic machinery: image first text second “STOP to End” matching campaign-looking URLs, And in two cases, the chirpy little “Hi Kevin” that somehow manages to feel less personal […]

Learn More May 22, 2026

Is Your Acquisition Renting the Same Pond?

Fundraising has a vocabulary problem that turns into a measurement problem, which then turns into a strategy problem. First we use a word too loosely, then we build reports around it, then we manage to the report as if the word meant what we hoped it meant. “Acquisition” is one of those words. In most […]

Learn More May 20, 2026

Motion Is Not Progress. Ask Less. Ask Better.

I should confess my bias upfront: for 15 years, I’ve watched Kevin Schulman build DonorVoice from a contrarian idea into one of the most rigorous enterprises in nonprofit fundraising. Plus, he’s a partner in The Agitator and a provocateur in the best sense, He “occasionally” blames me for bringing him into this world of fundraising […]

Learn More May 18, 2026

Are You Necessary or Critical?

Necessary and critical are synonyms but not equal. The former is more neutral, the latter more promotional, market-y. Which one should you use if you’re making a claim? Research from the National Academy of Sciences analyzed over 10 years of grant applications and found that more promotional language increases grant success. The relationship is really […]

Learn More May 15, 2026