Award Winning Blog - Agitator

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

No Money On The First Date

Marketing maven Seth Godin wrote The First Transaction, an interesting post about the need for cultivation to precede any ask for money. It’s a short post, so I’m reproducing most of it here … "Digital transactions are essentially free for you to provide. I can give you permission to teach me something. I can watch […]

Learn More December 15, 2009

$10 Million Gets My Attention

Regular readers know I urge "restraint" with respect to social media fundraising … in the sense that I believe there are higher priorities if your goal is to raise money today. But I received a message recently from Mandy O’Neill at Charity Dynamics, an interactive marketing agency, describing some of their success with fundraising — […]

Learn More December 14, 2009

When Silence Is Golden

I noticed this brief post on Social Media’s SmartBlog. It makes a hugely important point about social media. "It’s tempting to focus on social media as a pulpit for your own ideas. Who will you connect with? What will you say to them? How will you build those relationships into something tangible? But the fact […]

Learn More December 11, 2009