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Through The Rearview Mirror Of 2011

As Christmas approaches Tom can’t find his Grinch costume. Roger’s out of coal. So we did the next best thing: made our list, checked it twice, and found out which posts were ‘naughty’ and which were ‘nice. The Agitator’s esteemed Department of Analytics carefully measured which 2011 posts received the most readership, which garnered the […]

Learn More December 21, 2011

Fundraising Year In Review

This is the first of two posts on the year now ending. Today, a summary of giving for 2011 and some trends in direct mail. Tomorrow, the 2011 Pulse of Agitator readers. As we head for 2011’s fundraising finish line The Atlas of Giving on Friday reported that overall giving this year will finish 7.4% […]

Learn More December 20, 2011

Online ‘Fundraising’ A Misnomer?

A couple of small items caught my attention lately regarding online fundraising, mostly because they re-raised in my mind the question of what actually constitutes ‘online fundraising’. One was a short blog post by Jeff Brooks, Why it’s hard to raise funds online. Citing Smart Insights Digital Marketing blog, Jeff says it takes: 3 seconds […]

Learn More December 19, 2011

An Online Fundraising Campaign To Watch

Last year at this time I wrote a post about an online video campaign conducted by Volunteers of America Chesapeake, in the Baltimore/Washington area. Today I notice this report from comScore saying that 183 million American internet users watched online video content in November for an average of 20.5 hours per viewer. Within that, 7.2 […]

Learn More December 16, 2011

Which Mailbox Delivers Emotion?

Here’s a good study to read to follow-up on Roger’s post this week about multi-channel integration. Done by Epsilon, the Consumer Channel Preference Study (registration required) focuses particularly on consumer preferences with respect to direct mail and email. But it also looks at social media and mobile. (One disappointment … nothing on telemarketing.) Some findings: […]

Learn More December 15, 2011

Be Wary Of Absolutist Advice

Yesterday on his Future Fundraising Now blog (before which The Agitator often genuflects), Jeff Brooks proffered The case against innovation. It seems he tried to innovate once and failed. But now he’s made a second mistake, he’s broadly generalized from that experience and concludes: “If you want your fundraising to work, stick to the conventions.” […]

Learn More December 14, 2011