Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Is using the statistical average bad non profits?

Can a statistic be bad? Maybe an overstatement but the Average, a universally used (but maybe not fully understood) statistic can sure hide a lot. And without assigning malice or intent to the “hiding”, reliance on the average as an input to decision making can result in lots of bad outcomes. There are countless examples […]

Learn More January 24, 2012

Best Of The Best Fundraising Campaigns

From SOFII, aggregator of proven fundraising materials and insights, here is their list of the “23 all time great fundraising campaigns”. Each comes with a link describing or illustrating the campaign. I have two favorites on this list … The UNICEF card that launched that’s organization’s fundraising in 1946 — just because it’s so iconic. […]

Learn More

Career Pitfalls For Fundraisers

Seth Godin posted a rant last week on the US Congress, and offered this list of elected official behaviors to avoid in pursuing any career. Agitator friend Caity Craver thought this wasn’t a bad list for nonprofit fundraisers to think about. In all things, look for money first. Listen to people with money, respond to […]

Learn More January 23, 2012

4% Growth In Giving Forecast For 2012

U.S. charitable giving expanded in 2011 at a rate far exceeding economic growth for the year, and continued growth in giving is forecast for 2012 according to a major report just released by The Atlas of Giving. (View with a free subscription.) The Agitator also reports on the GivingUSA and the Blackbaud Indexes, but unlike […]

Learn More January 20, 2012

Real Fundraisers Don’t Whine, Worry or Wait

That’s why today we’re launching a new feature: The Agitator Toolbox of Innovation. There’s simply too much good stuff going on out there to spend time dithering about whether or when the economy will rebound, for boards to come to their senses … or whatever folks spend their time worrying about. Usually, things over which […]

Learn More January 19, 2012

Donor Segmentation – Why, How and What to Mail.

At DonorVoice we do a lot of segmentation work. In our previous lives we did even more. We love segmenting, slicing and dicing…And yet, we have seen far too many poorly conceived segmentation schemes and an equal number of well conceived ones that never get implemented. Heck, we’ve even participated in both scenarios and hopefully […]

Learn More January 18, 2012