Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Thank You MailChimp

As this study from email firm MailChimp indicates, a single word in the subject line can make a big difference in open rates. To reach its conclusions, in Choose Your Words Wisely MailChimp studied about 24 billion delivered emails, looking at subject lines composed in the aggregate of approximately 22,000 distinct words. Some findings … […]

Learn More November 26, 2013

Not Any Ring Will Do

Jeff Brooks at Future Fundraising Now strikes a nerve — or maybe the funny bone — with his recent post, Fundraising starts with donors, which in turn links to an article by David Meerman Scott, titled Making stuff up. C’mon, admit it! Anyone running a direct response fundraising program has committed the sin. I’m not […]

Learn More November 25, 2013

Death Of A Hero

This week our community lost a great and largely unsung hero. Michael MacLeod, co-founder and chair of Public Interest Data, Inc (PIDI), died on Wednesday leaving behind his wife Whitney, his daughter Kafi, and a legion of friends and causes whose lives he touched for the better. I don’t use the term ‘hero’ lightly. In […]

Learn More November 22, 2013

Why Start With ‘Why?’

In this TED talk, How Great Leaders Inspire Action, Simon Sinek points us to the power of ‘Why?’ In a nutshell, his argument is that most efforts to lead — to persuade or inspire or attract others to follow or invest in what we are urging — begin at the wrong end of the communications […]

Learn More November 21, 2013

Retention: Eliminating Guesswork

The likelihood of boosting retention in your organization will occur only when fundraisers, communications folks, donor service managers, program officers, CEOs and board members — virtually everyone in the organization — understand why donors stay or leave and what steps the organization can take to assure maximum retention. Getting to the point where you can […]

Learn More November 20, 2013

Retention: Right Questions … Wrong Answers

As you can see from Tom’s post yesterday, when it comes to fundraising planning and budgeting, The Agitator clearly believes the most important questions should focus on boosting retention and increasing lifetime value. Tom phrased the ‘Boss’s’ key planning questions this way: “I read The Agitator, so please bore in a bit on retention for […]

Learn More November 19, 2013