Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The Rest Of The Retention Story – Part 3

The most fundamental flaw in the conventional fundraising belief system is this: “Donors are born, not made.” Believers are certain that somewhere out there, if only they can find the right data overlays, if only they employ the right predictive acquisition models, or if only they can hit on the right exchange lists, there’s an […]

Learn More September 4, 2013

Left Out In The Cold, Again

Faithful Agitator readers know how much I admire the survey work of Pew Research. When it comes to insights into media and technology use, political attitudes, and social trends, they’re top rate. So why does their study of public esteem for various professions bug me? Because they don’t include fundraisers, or even a broader category […]

Learn More September 3, 2013

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