Award-Winning Blog


2010 Fundraising Plans – “We’re Exhausted”

This is our third and last report on The Agitator’s 2010 Fundraising Plans survey. In our previous two reports (here and here), we’ve described fundraisers’ mood as "creeping optimism," with 51% of our respondents expecting to raise more money in 2010, placing their highest expectations on recovery of major gifts and continued growth of online […]

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2010 Fundraising Plans – Investment Priorities

Yesterday, in our first report on The Agitator’s 2010 Fundraising Plans survey, we commented on the general mood of nonprofit fundraisers as they looked ahead to next year. Our assessment … creeping optimism. We noted that most fundraisers were expecting improvement in new donor prospecting, major gifts, and online giving. Today we’re looking at where […]

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2010 Fundraising Plans – Creeping Optimism

Today we’re giving the first of three topline reports on our just-concluded survey on nonprofit fundraisers’ 2010 fundraising plans. More tomorrow and Friday. Thanks to the 235 fundraisers who participated. We’ll start with the general mood and expectations. We asked a broad question: "Looking ahead, do you expect to raise more money in 2010 than […]

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Be Careful About Assumptions

We talk a lot about building relationships with current donors, especially in the face of more and more difficult new donor prospecting. Major gift fundraisers, at least the successful ones, are astute relationship builders. And generally the reward is quite apparent. It’s a bigger challenge to move relationship building down the donor pyramid. There’s a […]

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Who Is Your Best Competitor?

Every charity or nonprofit that seeks money (or members, visitors, clients or customers) — and every consultant or agency serving nonprofits — faces competition. It can be direct — EDF vs NRDC, Duke vs Stanford, Convio vs Blackbaud, Save the Children vs Worldvision — between organizations doing essentially the same thing in the same way. […]

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Help Us Help You

Agitator readers who are not subscribers to our email feed will not have received the following invitation from Roger earlier this week … Dear Agitator Reader: I’m writing to personally invite you to participate in The Agitator’s ‘Fundraising Plans for 2010’ online survey. Hopefully, we are beginning to emerge from recession, and Tom and I […]

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