Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Secret Millionaire In Your File

Over the weekend Tom sent me a link to an ABC News piece entitled “Secret Donor”. Diane Sawyer sets forth an absolutely charming and moving story about a Lake Forest College alumna named Grace Groner who died in January at age 100 and left the college $7 million. According to Lake Forest’s president the College […]

Learn More March 8, 2010

Report On Mobile Giving

Convio, Edge Research, and Sea Change Strategies have prepared this report on mobile giving, probing specifically into the mobile giving generated by the Haiti earthquake. The data reflects a survey of 1500 members of an online panel, screened as current charitable donors. The report notes that up to 12 January 2010 about $1 million had […]

Learn More March 5, 2010

Spray And Pray

In the direct mail channel, the thoughtless, non-strategic practice of tossing as many appeals and acquisition pieces as an organization can afford — regardless of long-term result — is referred to as "burn and churn." I’ve railed about that in earlier posts. For those interested in keeping their "bad practices" lexicon up-to-date, the equivalent heedless […]

Learn More March 4, 2010

Checklist Heaven

Direct marketing guru Denny Hatch was so enthralled with The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande that he updated his own direct marketer’s checklist. Denny’s checklist is 58 items long, so it’s pretty comprehensive. For example, here’s #2: Does your copy contain some or all of the 13 most powerful and evocative words in the English […]

Learn More March 3, 2010

Social Media And Event Fundraising

Here is a "must read" report from Blackbaud and Charity Dynamics: Making Event Participants More Successful with Social Media Tools. The two firms looked at 1750 events with nearly one million participants to answer these questions: Do integrated Facebook® tools help make event participants more successful online fundraisers? Is Twitter® an effective fundraising solicitation tool […]

Learn More March 2, 2010

A Reminder About Offer Testing

Here’s a brief article from the McKinsey Quarterly on "behavioral economics" … or why people make certain spending decisions and how they approach them. Each of the four principles/examples given relates to how a product is presented or priced in a retail context: 1. Make a product’s cost less painful. 2. Harness the power of […]

Learn More March 1, 2010