Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The Crusonia Donor

University of Chicago economist Frank Knight came up with a thought experiment called the Crusonia plant. It was a miraculous organism. You planted it once and it produced fruit year after year, without labor, maintenance, risk, depletion, or decay. It was meant to be absurd, using the Crusonia to imagine an asset whose value came […]

Learn More June 1, 2026

The Author Is Not to Be Informed

Memorandum To: The Book Launch Committee From: Department of Applied Fundraising Nonsense Re: Promotional strategy for The Volume Trap Classification: Sensitive, because the author is becoming difficult The committee has reviewed The Volume Trap and identified several promotion challenges. First, the book argues fundraising has scaled activity instead of understanding. Second, it suggests more asking […]

Learn More May 29, 2026

13 Years and Still Explaining Basic Arithmetic to Boards

We’ve been writing about “cost of fundraising” as a deeply flawed metric since we launched The Agitator in 2013. Thirteen years. The argument hasn’t gotten more complicated and too many boards haven’t gotten smarter. Let’s try one more time. The Metric That Rewards Shrinking Cost of fundraising — expressed as cents raised per dollar spent, […]

Learn More May 27, 2026

Memorial Day: What We Owe the Young

Look at any cemetery on Memorial Day, and you see a quiet sea of stone. But look closer, and you see the true weight of the day: it is a holiday paid for almost entirely by the young. For older generations, these rows of white markers evoke a sacred era of collective duty—a time […]

Learn More May 25, 2026

Your Vendor’s Dashboard Does Not Show the Donor’s Day

Yesterday was my lucky day, I received three cold MMS fundraising appeals from three different charities. It was different sender numbers and causes but clearly the same basic machinery: image first text second “STOP to End” matching campaign-looking URLs, And in two cases, the chirpy little “Hi Kevin” that somehow manages to feel less personal […]

Learn More May 22, 2026

Is Your Acquisition Renting the Same Pond?

Fundraising has a vocabulary problem that turns into a measurement problem, which then turns into a strategy problem. First we use a word too loosely, then we build reports around it, then we manage to the report as if the word meant what we hoped it meant. “Acquisition” is one of those words. In most […]

Learn More May 20, 2026