Award Winning Blog - Agitator

How (Dis) Loyal Donors Process Direct Mail from You and Your Competitors

Let’s first get a definitional piece addressed up front. We define loyalty based on how Committed Donors are to a brand. This is attitudinal loyalty, derived by what they think and feel about an organization and we have proven its link to donor behavior. A behavior based view of loyalty is often spurious. Using both, […]

Learn More October 26, 2011

First, Make Rice

Roger and I are planning to push hard for innovation in posts to come. But don’t mistake that thrust for our abandoning of the necessity to master the basic fundamentals of fundraising. Seth Godin wrote a real gem on this point a couple of weeks ago. It’s short, so I’ve reproduced in its entirety … […]

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Putting The Lipstick On

A couple of posts back, we said, “The product matters“. In response, along comes Kathy Swayze with a comment saying what few fundraisers dare to say: “Your ‘quality of the product matters’ resonates. But how many fundraisers are stuck trying to put lipstick on a pig because the mission, focus and actions of their organization […]

Learn More October 25, 2011

Donor Behavior AND Donor Attitudes – How they (should) work together.

Donor Behavior vs.AND Donor Attitudes It seems the vast majority of non-profits define loyalty based on past behavior. And like the financial, Cover Your Ass (CYA) language in all prospectuses reminds us, past behavior is no guarantee of future performance. But neither of course is a purely attitudinal basis for segmenting and understanding your donor […]

Learn More October 24, 2011

UGH! More Work

On your normal nonprofit website, fewer than 5% of visitors take any of the proffered actions, such as signing up for an e-newsletter, responding to an action alert, clicking on a video … let alone donating. In my book, improving that rate of interaction is the toughest challenge for any nonprofit’s web team. If anybody […]

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The Product Matters

I’m both an opera fan and a commentator on fundraising, so I eagerly read the NY Times article a week or so back on the spectacular recent fundraising success of NewYork’s Metropolitan Opera. The headline flagged that the Met had raised $182 million in donations. This amount was fully 50% more than it had raised […]

Learn More October 21, 2011