Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The Last From A Fundraising First

Vinay Bhagat, Founder of Convio and tireless online fundraising evangelist, posted his final blog on Friday, his last day at Convio. The title of Vinay’s final post is Be the Change You Wish to See in the World, based on a favorite quote from Mahatma Gandhi. In his post Vinay traces his last 13 years […]

Learn More May 7, 2012

Should You Drop Me From Your Email List?

I get fundraising emails regularly from nonprofits to whom I haven’t contributed in years … in one case, about 6+ years. From their perspective, when — if ever — should they give up on me? Since I give mostly to advocacy groups, perhaps I confuse them. I’ll respond to the occasional action alert, if I […]

Learn More May 4, 2012

Vanity Metrics

What are you measuring? This article from Huffington Post — Are Vanity Metrics Making Your Organization Sick? — argues that too many organizations measure the wrong things … and when they do, they are “bound to get sick.” Vanity metrics are “metrics that only look at the surface performance and don’t relate to the actual […]

Learn More May 3, 2012

Thank You For Real Data On Thank You’s

Hallelujah! Actual test data on the efficacy of thank you’s. In case you’ve haven’t noticed, here’s is a bit of testing information just posted on The Agitator website by Angel Aloma at Food For The Poor … “Thank you letters have been very effective fundraisers for our organization. On average, we get more than one […]

Learn More May 2, 2012

Won’t Make A Difference

Grey Matter Research has put out some survey findings regarding why people don’t support nonprofits. Most of you have seen research like this, and overall the findings don’t contain any surprises. Nevertheless, one finding did stand out to me, even though I’ve seen it replicated numerous times … Four out of ten non-donors agreed with […]

Learn More May 1, 2012

Why Donors Tune You Out

Mark Phillips at Bluefrog has written an excellent post called Why donors don’t want to hear from you. I heartily commend it to you. He cites survey data that shows donors are quite sensitive to charities using inaccurate personal data in their communications. For example: 20% of respondents would stop giving to charities that used […]

Learn More April 30, 2012