Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Idle Hands Are The Devil’s Playground

It’s not exactly like we were sitting around wondering what to do with our free time (other than reading Chaucer), but when the request came from our colleagues over at DonorTrends to contribute to their new blog named Fundraising Action, we leaped at the opportunity. We thought about the economy of merging the two blogs […]

Learn More June 9, 2010

Cashing In On The Chasm

In the case of many non-profits the much-vaunted “Fundraising Pyramid” too often resembles an hourglass. Fat on the ends, skinny in the middle. So I was particularly pleased to see Nicole Wallace over at the Chronicle of Philanthropy recently tackle the subject of middle donor or mid-level donor programs. As the name implies, Mid-Level or […]

Learn More June 8, 2010

The Risk of Cooperation

The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico has intensified the never-ending debate over just how close non-profits should get to corporate benefactors whose behavior is sometimes the antithesis of everything the non-profit seems to stand for. Although The Nature Conservancy has never hidden the fact that it has received $10 million in gifts of cash […]

Learn More June 7, 2010

Can’t Fight The Demographics

Yesterday, in the course of making some comments about raising money from Boomers, I published this chart estimating the number of individuals in each cohort prepared by The Boomer Project. Today I want to make a different point about this chart. Today there are already more than twice as many Gen X and Gen Y’ers […]

Learn More June 4, 2010

Boomers: Love ‘Em Or Leave ‘Em?

I love these reports from The Boomer Project … they’re the Agitator’s agitator. While they almost never address fundraising directly, one need only scratch lightly to discover some implications. There are some great nuggets in this one. For example, I’ve just learned that the latest crisis in France is over raising the retirement age from […]

Learn More June 3, 2010

Report To Me

I was reading this article on effective email messaging, the gist of which was … make it relevant via personalization. Now there are a variety of ways to personalize, especially in (but not limited to) the online environment — using the donor’s location to tailor content, keying off of actions taken (completed a survey, signed […]

Learn More June 2, 2010