Award Winning Blog - Agitator

How Does Your Packaging Compare?

One of the key lessons in the Walter Isaacson’s book, Steve Jobs, is the passionate attention and priority Jobs gave to design, even to the point where design considerations often over-ruled engineering constraints (frequently obliterating them). As recounted by Isaacson (p. 78), Jobs’ first mentor and investor, Mike Markkula, boiled the Apple marketing philosophy down […]

Learn More May 30, 2012

Our Accomplishments Together

Debra Richmond commends this email Annual Report from Be The Match, a bone marrow registry helping patients get transplants from non-related donors. I agree. Using simple infographics, the email (subject line: Our Accomplishments Together ) effectively delivers the bottom line results (how could you not scroll through?), emphasizing that you — the donor — made […]

Learn More May 29, 2012

Taking Risks With Your Fundraising

Yesterday’s post talked about evaluating overall effectiveness of marketing (including fundraising) programs. I cited a McKinsey article that included the following as one of five key questions to examine in your organization: How are we managing financial risk in our marketing plans? McKinsey talks about setting risk parameters that enabled some changes in the marketing […]

Learn More May 25, 2012

Measuring Marketing’s Worth

Here is an excellent article from McKinsey Quarterly on evaluating an organization’s overall marketing effectiveness … that is, getting more bang for the marketing buck. McKinsey boils it down to asking five questions. Or more accurately, five lines of inquiry, each with a host of questions. If you have reason to be taking an overall […]

Learn More May 24, 2012

Standing Out In A Crowded Mailbox

We’re talking over-crowded email inboxes here. Were your email appeals ever ‘sexy’?! I thought not. But there’s an important point made in this article from Synchronicity Marketing, titled: Bringing Sexy Back to Email: 3 More Ways to Stand Out in a Crowded Inbox. The competition in the inbox is getting tougher and tougher. Your email […]

Learn More May 23, 2012

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