Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Fundraising Black Eye

There’s been a ton of local coverage of the Scripps Howard study of IRS-reported (or not!) fundraising expenses by large US nonprofits. None of it flattering to the fundraising ‘industry’. Scripps Howard looked at the most recent IRS Form 990’s for the nearly 38,000 nonprofits and charities that raise at least $1 million per year, […]

Learn More May 22, 2012

Don’t Just Thank Them

I’ve said some irreverent things about thanking donors in the past few weeks. So I had mixed feelings about this recent post by Katya Andresen. I agree with her main point 1000%: “The single most powerful thing you can do as a fundraiser is to take great care of the donors you have.” Amen … […]

Learn More May 21, 2012

Figuring out why people donate while avoiding their rationale answers to the question

A lot gets written about how people are not particularly rationale, we engage or belief all sorts of irrational things. And yet, when asked why we do certain things we often give very rationale answers. This seeming split between our rationale reports about why behave the way we do and our irrational acts provides ammunition […]

Learn More May 18, 2012

Talk About Silence!

Little did I know when I wrote a Wednesday post titled Deadly Silence! Within 24 hours our web hosting service crashed and we were unable to deliver an Agitator post on Thursday. Sorry about that! So, we’ve just got back up and running, hopefully with better ‘infrastructure’. We had been talking about testing landing pages, […]

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Deadly Silence

The mobile phone has become the ultimate response device. Donors can respond instantly to stimulus from any other medium – a TV commercial to a billboard to your fundraising letter or email appeal. Considering the ascendancy of mobile devices, David Berkowitz writing in Social Media Insider proposes “Death to Internet Week” (which I gather is […]

Learn More May 16, 2012

Of Course … The Landing Page

Yesterday we talked about what to test in terms of making email campaigns more effective. And I asked … What did we miss? Reader Dawn Stoner could have said … DUH! Landing pages. But she was more polite, recommending as follows: “Email landing pages! Since goal completion (donation, action) takes place not in the email […]

Learn More May 15, 2012