Award Winning Blog - Agitator

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

Definitive Study On Millennials

If you are trying to figure out Millennials (the 18-29 year old generation), here from Pew Research is the study you’ve been waiting for. The Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change looks at Millennials across all dimensions — lifestyle, technology use, social and political attitudes — often including comparisons to older generations. The study is […]

Learn More February 26, 2010

Nonprofit Video Tips

Yesterday’s Agitator post raised the issue of combining direct mail and online video for fundraising purposes. And a few readers shared their experiences via Comments. Check them out. Then, coincidentally, today arrives this article from nonprofit marketing consultant Nancy Schwartz offering nine tips for nonprofits interested in producing videos. If you’ve done video production already, […]

Learn More February 25, 2010