Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Your Donor Is Not a Delivery Truck

Defining donors by channel is a bit like defining me by whether Amazon, USPS, UPS or FedEx delivers my packages. It’s accurate, objective and almost entirely inconsequential to what I bought or why. Calling someone an online donor makes the same mistake. The donor may have seen a piece of mail, passed a billboard, heard […]

Learn More July 24, 2026

Lunch Isn’t Free, Nor is Email

How many of you have read performance reports where the email cost is $0? Does anyone else find zero cost to be silly? A study analyzed 746,426 email solicitations sent to 21,451 online survey panelists over three years. The modeled out 3 possible explanations for attrition: people never permanently disengage people disengage as time passes […]

Learn More July 22, 2026

Make Them Look, Then Make Them Leave

One identifiable person, visible need, tight crop, visceral with a direct gaze and set of eyeballs that can follow the donor all the way to the reply device. This seems defensible, more visible suffering creates more attention, more emotion and therefore more giving. But does this neat, tidy advice treat three different behaviors as if […]

Learn More July 17, 2026

Strategy Is Whatever Gets a Row

Does this look familiar? Spring Appeal. Summer Appeal. Fall Appeal. Year End. Then the channels are added underneath. Direct mail, email, digital, phone. This uber common way of organizing the world is a major decision point that was probably decided by default, by habit. What’s the strategic unit? With this approach, it’s the campaign. All the rich […]

Learn More July 15, 2026

Donor Horoscopes

I enjoy mocking generational marketing. You know the genre; Boomers are loyal, Millennials want meaning, Gen Z wants authenticity, TikTok, and oat-milk. But that doesn’t mean birth cohort tells us nothing. There are three things that get lazily shoved into the same generational bucket. An age effect is what happens because people get older. Risk-taking tends […]

Learn More July 13, 2026

Refuse the Miracle. Accept the Work.

I’ve read most of the AI-and-fundraising books, white papers and blogs published in the last two years. A depressing number of them are brochures with page numbers — breathless, vendor-adjacent, promising that a chatbot will rescue a donor file nobody bothered to clean. They sell the miracle and skip the work. Steve MacLaughlin’s just-published AI […]

Learn More July 10, 2026