Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Excel at Fundraising Without Excel

Channel fundraising starts with budgeting whose revenue, expense and net is intractably broken out by channel. What follows is avalanche size momentum for fundraising teams to live in those channels. It’s hard to think of donors in anyway other than digital donors, mail donors, telemarketing donors. The channel is our main definition of the donor. […]

Learn More March 4, 2024

From Ship Building to Ship Wrecking

Let’s face it, most fundraisers and the nonprofits they serve—along with virtually every other profession– are governed by motives beyond just the noble ones they claim. Nonprofits need to raise money to survive. Journalism is a business that needs to make money to survive. Political candidates need to raise money to campaign and win. Increasingly there […]

Learn More March 1, 2024

Thimble or Ocean?

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” I always attributed this to Mark Twain, the internet isn’t so sure. Ironic since my certainty would have bet everything were it a Jeopardy category. Mistaking a thimble of knowledge for an ocean is […]

Learn More February 28, 2024

Storytelling To A Goldfish

In 2015 the Internet blew up with the humans have less attention than a goldfish stat. Twitter advertising got a bump as marketers sought human goldfish living in the self-imposed 140-character limit world. PowerPoint slide decks with obligatory goldfish bowls and memes proliferated. It’s rumored the National Basketball Association hotly debated the need shorten games […]

Learn More February 23, 2024

Turning Up the Bull*#$% Meter

I did a search on the Agitator/DonorVoice blog for “engagement” and found a post in the way back machine from 2009. Tom Belford wrote the post. Tom is uber smart, dry witted, curmudgeonly and with a bullshit meter purposefully tuned to the highest sensitivity. So, it’s saying something that the post was touting the merits […]

Learn More February 21, 2024

Presidents’ Day or Identity Crisis?

It’s an odd holiday here in the States. The Brits might call it a Bank Holiday. It used to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. In fact, in the annals of US Government paperwork it’s still officially listed as this by the US Office of Personnel Management, which I think is like their HR Department. At any […]

Learn More February 19, 2024