Award Winning Blog - Agitator

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

$1 Billion On Black Friday

‘Black Friday’ … the day after US Thanksgiving that for many marks the first ‘official’ shopping day of the holiday season, saw over $1 billion in online sales — the first time online sales have ever passed that milestone on any day. According to comScore, 57 million Americans made online purchases, with their chief destinations […]

Learn More November 28, 2012

Persuade Or Convince?

In this ‘to the point’ post, marketer Seth Godin argues simply that: “Marketers don’t convince. Engineers convince. Marketers persuade.” As Godin observes, persuasion is about emotion and imagination. Convincing is about data and rationality. His conclusion: “If you’re spending a lot of your time trying to convince people, it’s no wonder it’s not working.” In […]

Learn More November 27, 2012

Minced Pie And Fundraisers

The memory came flooding back last week as I read Tom’s post on telemarketing … … I had just made what I felt was a mighty effective case for a major gift from the CEO of a major American company and was absolutely startled when he said “No, I won’t give!” Shocked, I asked him, […]

Learn More November 26, 2012