Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Komen Versus Planned Parenthood

Officially The Agitator is a blog about nonprofit fundraising and communications. So I’m recommending you read Getting Attention’s Nancy Schwartz’s excellent analysis of the Komen vs. Planned Parenthood debacle from the perspective of what makes for effective (and ineffective communications) and smart fundraising (on Planned Parenthood’s part) in response to threat. Tom P.S. Stuff ’em […]

Learn More February 3, 2012

Want to know what donor centric should look like?

This is a fantastic Rorschach test for nonprofits (courtesy of a London based shop, Targetbase Claydon Heeley). What do you see on the left side? What do you see on the right side? If the answer to the both has the words “cute” and/or “funny” then you’re human. If both responses do NOT include […]

Learn More February 2, 2012

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 […]

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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