Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Down With Fundraising Nonsense

During last week’s Bridge Conference in Washington, DC I recommended that every organization and every agency conduct a ‘Nonsense Audit’. Conducting an audit like this represents nothing more—or less – than a serious effort to identify those huge, non-productive, expensive time-wasters and complexities that add little value, but serve as enormous barriers to change and […]

Learn More August 13, 2012

‘Free-riding’

In our presentation regarding ‘Harnessing Change’ at the Bridge Conference on Wednesday, Roger and I commented on, among other things, the fundraising pros and cons of social nets. In some respects, the social nets pose a threat to nonprofits as vehicles for giving and activism, because they are so empowering of direct individual action. And […]

Learn More August 10, 2012

Flat Earth Fundraising: Catch & Release Fishing

Too many direct response fundraisers, many of whom should know better, continue to resort to acquisition techniques that only serve to camouflage the erosion and dry rot destroying long-term donor performance and value. Whether it’s the over-use of premiums or the increasing dependence on cooperative databases (see piece in Direct Marketing News), the amount of […]

Learn More August 9, 2012

Day Off

Well, not exactly. Roger and I are making our first joint public appearance in the history of The Agitator on Wednesday, although I’m cheating a bit … I’ll be there via Skype from New Zealand! We’ll be doing a rant of some sort on ‘Harnessing Change’, the theme of the 2012 Bridge Conference in Washington, […]

Learn More August 8, 2012

Where Does Fundraising Begin?

If you said ‘the donor relationship’ you’d be wrong! Well, not entirely, The Agitator would still give you a B+. But as he answers with respect to all marketing in his post, The circles of marketing, Seth Godin would say … The Product As Godin says: “When the thing you sell has communication built in, […]

Learn More August 7, 2012

How to find attitudinally derived segments across your entire house file with the “ABA Sandwich”

For direct marketers (and researchers for that matter) the Achilles heel of attitudinal data is not having answers for everybody, only our sample. This tends to relegate findings to interesting, maybe even useful but never mission critical – at least in the eyes of fundraisers and direct marketers. What if you could know, with reasonable […]

Learn More August 6, 2012