Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Mobile Shopping for Charities

Pew Research has just released this study on how Americans use their mobile phones to assist with in-store purchasing decisions. There’s an underlying phenomenon here that’s highly relevant, I think, to nonprofit fundraising. Pew reports that more than half of adult cell phone owners used their cell phones while they were in a store to […]

Learn More February 2, 2012

What is Important To Your Donors? Is This Even the Right Question?

What is important to your donors? What keeps them as donors? Is the answer to these two questions the same? Our answer is a definitive “it depends”. What is important can be very different if asked in a vacuum or depending on the context provided. We’d argue however, that while asking in a vacuum is […]

Learn More February 1, 2012

Direct mail: How To Beat The Control

Donor acquisition is entering its 6th year of a prolonged and steady slump for most organizations. And probably another year of playing the blame game —“poor lists”, “weak economy”, “increased competition” — won’t make things better. Neither will ordering your copywriters, no matter how talented, to “beat the control” be of any help. After 40+ […]

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Needed: Hispanic Donors

Unless, of course, your nonprofit can afford to ignore the fastest growing population segment in the US. By 2050, one in three Americans will be Hispanic. Yet the Agitator hardly ever sees any fundraising mention of the Hispanic audience. So we were gratified to see this article regarding a charity that has built a Hispanic […]

Learn More January 31, 2012

Flat Earth Fundraising: Moneyball

I have a suggestion for the conference planners at AFP, DMA, CASE and every other association in our nonprofit galaxy: Scrap two hours, 13 minutes of “seen this, heard that” sessions, serve free popcorn, and treat your registrants to a screening of Moneyball. I’m serious. Here’s why. Moneyball, the 2003 iconoclastic bestseller by Michael Lewis […]

Learn More January 30, 2012

Surveying Your Donors – Tips and How (not) To’s…

Up until this point, we’ve not blogged much on survey research design and best practices – a 101 or “how to” kind of post. We are going to start now and hopefully, it is useful. If not, speak up. A caveat upfront; our view is that survey research, especially questionnaire design and analysis is not […]

Learn More January 27, 2012