Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Will Your Donors Share Information?

Direct response fundraisers realize that customizing appeals to specific donors will lift results. But what information is available to allow you to make just the right appeal? In the fundraising sector, we’re pretty good at capturing and using transactional information — past giving history (which should include what kind of appeals have been responded to, […]

Learn More August 30, 2013

Copywriting Genius

To say Jerry Huntsinger, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday, is a direct mail copywriting genius, is an understatement. It’s like saying Steve Jobs ‘tinkered with electronic gadgets’. Roger and I have frequently pointed Agitator readers toward Jerry’s copywriting wisdom. And thank god (thank Ken Burnett) that SOFII has become the publisher of Jerry’s treasury […]

Learn More August 29, 2013

How Do Your Donors ‘Tag’ You?

Believe me, you want to be tagged! And I don’t mean in the ‘finding your web content’ sense. I mean in the sense of first impressions. A couple of days ago I wrote about the roles of emotion and logic in consumer purchase decisions, and casually mentioned the pop science on left and right brain […]

Learn More August 28, 2013

The Rest of The Retention Story – Part 2

We’ll never make much progress solving the retention problem until we get rid of the myopic and wrong-headed metrics used by most direct response fundraisers to measure ‘success’. One reason for the mistaken use of myopic metrics stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the term ‘attribution’. In reality it means assigning results or performance to […]

Learn More August 27, 2013

When Emotion, When Logic?

We all know the two sides of our brain have their different ways of looking at the world and responding to what the world, including all of us fundraisers, throws at it. While a bit over-simplistic, we accept the basic notion that one side favors logical analysis and categories while the other favors emotion and […]

Learn More August 26, 2013

Bad News From Breaking Bad

You’ve heard the old chestnut: ‘No publicity is bad publicity’. Well, the folks at the National Cancer Coalition are re-thinking that one! This ‘charity’ was recently listed as #21 on the “America’s Worst Charities” rankings by the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting. OK, by any definition, that’s not good publicity. But […]

Learn More August 23, 2013