Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Magnets Anyone?

Here’s an article from DirectMarketingIQ extolling the virtues of involvement devices in direct mail appeals. Magnets are a classic. First of all, yes, lots of testing confirms that this stuff generally lifts response (but that’s not an excuse to not test before you commit your own nonprofit to thousands of tchotchkes). The article asserts that […]

Learn More July 26, 2010

Improve Your Online Fundraising

Here’s a great presentation from Convio on improving the fundraising performance of your website. I like it because its recommendations are data-driven … they didn’t spring out the imagination of someone’s creative department. And I like the recommendations because they are specific and produced real results for the client who is the subject of the […]

Learn More July 23, 2010

Excitement Or Peacefulness?

Here’s a brief article at Engage: Boomers that once again reminds us as marketers/fundraisers to think carefully about our audience and put ourselves in their shoes. Brent Bouchez, principal in a firm that focuses on messaging to the 50+ universe, cites a Stanford Graduate School of Business study on age and happiness, which found — […]

Learn More July 22, 2010

Telefundraising Works

A few days ago we posted on telephone solicitation, the neglected stepchild of fundraising. The post generated some comments like I’d like to give more exposure to. First, from Adrian Salmon, writing about the experience of Save the Children UK: They printed full-page colour advertisements in newspapers asking readers to text in the word ‘ceasefire’ […]

Learn More July 21, 2010

Givers Or Donors?

OK, if you followed the flow of Spectators Or Fans and Spectators or Fans – II, you could see this coming! I’m going out on a limb here and proposing a new set of definitions … A “giver” is anyone who has made only one contribution to your nonprofit. A “donor” is anyone who has: […]

Learn More July 20, 2010

Spectators or Fans – II

I’d like to pull together strands from two recent Agitator posts. Spectators or Fans dealt with the challenge of moving individuals a nonprofit might engage from being relatively passive observers to becoming active advocates. Then we reported on two extremely helpful online fundraising reports from Convio and Blackbaud respectively. In response to our post on […]

Learn More July 19, 2010