Award Winning Blog - Agitator

A Special Christmas Song

The Agitator has few traditions at this point. But here is one of them. For our third Christmas, we urge you to get into a mirthful holiday mood by listening to this unforgettable rendition of O Holy Night. The Agitator Guarantee: This performance will leave you smiling well into the New Year, or we’ll refund […]

Learn More December 23, 2009

Online Giving Peaks Next Week

I hope you’re not giving your online fundraising team time off next week.* As Stephanie Strom reported recently in the NYT, citing data from Convio, a phenomenal spike in online giving occurs at year-end … literally December 31st. Here’s what she says … "New data from Convio, a software company, shows that charitable donors that […]

Learn More December 22, 2009

More On Cheque-less Fundraising

My post last week on Britain’s plans to go "cheque-less" by 2018 generated a lot of comment (some publicly posted, some private emails), so I thought I’d summarize some of the key points made. First of all, it’s true. The Payments Council, a banking industry group in the UK, has announced its intention to phase […]

Learn More December 20, 2009

Fundraising Without Checks

In a comment on The Agitator, Jim Toscano of the Minneapolis Heart Foundation says that checks will no longer be used in Britain in nine years. And he asks: "What effect would it have on our fund-raising process if donors didn’t have a check to use to convey funds?" Fascinating question. But first of all, […]

Learn More December 18, 2009

The Right Way To Cultivate

Here is a terrific comment on yesterday’s Agitator post from Andrew Kramer describing how his organization, Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) in Houston, builds cultivation into the guts of their program … and the enormous benefits reaped. He was taking me to task for treating cultivation merely as a monetary cost. Actually, The Agitator has been […]

Learn More December 17, 2009

The Toughest Fundraising Calculation

I’ve been hoarding some recent posts by Seth Godin that are especially pertinent to fundraising. Yesterday I talked about a post where his message was, in effect. don’t ask for money on the first date … cultivate, then ask. I suggested that his dictum might apply in the increasingly challenging world of new donor acquisition, […]

Learn More December 16, 2009