Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Acquisition: Direct Mail Testing – Part 2

One of the biggest pitfalls in direct mail testing is the ‘baby & the bathwater’ problem. The problem occurs when an organization or its consultant creates and mails a test package with numerous test elements. Or to put it in the vernacular, a whole bunch of stuff is changed. When this happens, the results for […]

Learn More December 5, 2012

Acquisition: Direct Mail Testing – Part 1

Tom’s post on the Obama campaign’s email testing prompts me to weigh in on one of the least understood and woefully mis-practiced skills in the direct response fundraiser’s repertoire – direct mail testing. Recognize any of these symptoms in your organization or among your clients? The test ideas that make it into the mail […]

Learn More December 4, 2012

Hey!

There’s testing … and there’s TESTING! I might have promised to move past marketing/fundraising lessons from the recent US election campaigns, but I just can’t resist passing this article along — The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails — from Bloomberg Businessweek. The Obama digital team, which included 20 writers alone (!), tested every aspect […]

Learn More December 3, 2012

Top 12 Reasons Why Fundraising Best Practices Suck

1) Best Practices lead to copying 2) Copying is a race to look the same 3) When everything looks the same it is a commoditized market 4) A commoditized market is very price sensitive 5) A price sensitive offering can only improve margin through cost management 6) By only focusing on cost management the innovation […]

Learn More November 30, 2012

Brilliant Fundraising Products

I’ve always been intrigued with the challenge of growing monthly giving programs. We’re all familiar with the undisputed king of monthly giving — child sponsorship (this might be the first … Plan Spain, 1937). [I’m not quite sure why SOFII included The Onion’s hilarious spoof of child sponsor programs in its coverage here. Although I […]

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Giving Tuesday … Or Was It Monday?

More often, Roger is the curmudgeon at The Agitator editors’ meetings, but I guess today the distinction falls to me. Roger called my attention to this notice that on the inaugural ‘#Giving Tuesday‘ (how did I miss this on my calendar?), online contributions (at least those processed by Blackbaud) were up 53% over the same […]

Learn More November 29, 2012