Award Winning Blog - Agitator

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

Any Color You Want … As Long As It’s Black

Twitterland, the nonprofit newswires, and my email lit up early Tuesday morning with news that Blackbaud, the largest provider of fundraising software to nonprofit organizations, had announced its plans to acquire Convio, one of its largest competitors, for $275 million. The deal is expected to close by the end of March. The purchase of Convio […]

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Text Giving A No-Brainer

That’s one of many bits of insight provided by Pew Research’s latest study of mobile giving, which looked in depth at text giving to the Haiti earthquake disaster in early 2010, and compared that to other (prior and subsequent) mobile and online giving. What struck me was that 76% of the Haiti text givers said […]

Learn More January 17, 2012

Listening To Agitator Readers

Thanks for the great response to last week’s Agitator reader survey. We’ve gotten heaps of advice to think about … and some nice compliments too. So … who are you? If there’s such a thing as the ‘average’ Agitator reader, you are most likely to be a direct response fundraiser, in ‘the business’ for 4-10 years, […]

Learn More January 16, 2012