Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Awareness Isn’t a Funnel, It’s a Filter

Coincidence or serendipity intervened for this follow up to my last post, where I argued saying “trust” and “relevance” isn’t the same as understanding it. On Saturday I came across a real gift, a doctoral researcher shared raw data from a study with real donors across 26 charities that measured relationship and brand concepts from […]

Learn More April 15, 2026

The Best Copy Editor I Ever Had Didn’t Know a Thing About Fundraising

Let me tell you about the best copy editor I ever had. He never wrote a word. Didn’t know what a response rate was. Didn’t care about lift, segmentation, or attribution models. And sure as hell couldn’t spell “multichannel.” His name was Pickle. He died yesterday. He was a Staffy—a gray-blue, muscular little […]

Learn More April 12, 2026

When Privacy Outperforms Exposure in Fundraising

Expose and show the visceral, human part of the need to fuel giving, that seems like a common sector thesis. Show more pain and while we’re at it, show more of the person, their face in fact,the raw emotion of it, making it impossible to ignore and fueling empathy. There’s an intuitive logic to it. […]

Learn More April 10, 2026

You Don’t Get Extra Credit for Saying Trust or Relevance

The nonprofit sector has a habit of replacing hard questions with soft nouns. Trust. Relevance. Engagement. Participation. These words get thrown around as if they’re self-explanatory and strategically useful. We need more trust and relevance or maybe trust is fine and relevance is the problem. I hear “participation” talked about as a solution rather than […]

Learn More April 8, 2026

The Case for More Overhead, Reserves, and Yes, Debt

Some might say I’m contrarian. Some might be right. In keeping with what some people think, try this on: Charities need more debt. Less revenue diversification. Less leanness, meaning bigger reserves. Higher overhead. That runs directly against what the rating agencies (e.g. Charity Navigator) reward, their implicit model is clean balance sheets, diversified revenue, low […]

Learn More April 6, 2026

Does Your A/B Test Have a People Problem?

“If only we could get more people to give…” “If only we could get more people to give and do so more regularly.” “Let’s devise a test.” The HiPPO doesn’t hesitate. “More people will give if we change the landing page. Less text. Or more text. Fewer fields. We should test that.” “Great,” says someone […]

Learn More April 3, 2026