Award Winning Blog - Agitator

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

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