Award Winning Blog - Agitator

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 … […]

Learn More October 26, 2011

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

Water Is Wet

Jeff Brooks blogging at Future Fundraising Now is always making fun of research. To Jeff, research is a distraction from the real world — that is, the world in which individuals make actual donations (or don’t make them) in response to identifiable stimuli (e.g. specific letters, emails, calls), which behavior can then be tracked, measured, […]

Learn More October 20, 2011