Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Do You Love Your Customers?

“Do you love your customers?” asks Seth Godin in a recent post. It’s a big mistake to view and treat your customers (aka donors) as the means to an end, he argues. Says Godin: “In a free market with plenty of information, it’s very hard to succeed merely by loving the money your customers pay […]

Learn More February 6, 2014

‘F’ Grade For Online Giving

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports a new study which gives a ‘F’ grade to most nonprofits for their online fundraising. The study of 151 charities, including 100 on the Chron’s Top 400 list, points to many shortcomings in these organizations’ online fundraising practices. Here’s where to download the Online Fundraising Scorecard, prepared by Dunham+Company. What […]

Learn More February 5, 2014

Beware the ‘C’ Word(s)

Yesterday, in Overcoming The Noise, I raised the specter of competition in the nonprofit world … specifically that fundraisers needed to deal with the reality that they must compete for the attention — and ultimately dollars — of their prospective donors. I was primarily talking about the ‘competition’ — the noise — from all the […]

Learn More February 4, 2014

Why Your Analytics Is Costing You Time and Money

Modeling (or analytics) for selection is way overrated and much of the time it doesn’t beat a simple RFM bucketing in Excel. What the sector really needs is a model for understanding but more on that in minute. The modeling (or analytics) for selection is about using transactional – and perhaps demographic or lifestyle data […]

Learn More February 3, 2014

Overcoming The Noise

When you think about the competition for those donor dollars your organization deserves, you probably think first about the other nonprofits active in your space. Curses are muttered. But that assumes a head-to-head competition — donor gets their message, gets your message, compares the two … and they win the contribution. In reality, your message […]

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Making Losers Into Winners

Even The Agitator gets caught up in Super Bowl fever, although we still think of an ‘end run’ as something a good fundraiser pulls off when the boss says ‘No!’ to a good idea. And a ‘double reverse’ is the trick play fundraising consultants run when they fail to meet projections. Here’s a question … […]

Learn More January 31, 2014