Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Glass Half-Full, Or Half-Empty?

Recent surveys on consumer confidence and expectations about the economy will separate optimistic fundraisers from the pessimists. Typical of what I’m seeing is this survey released last week by Harris Interactive. It reports that only 24% of Americans see their own household’s financial situation getting better in the next six months. On the other hand, […]

Learn More September 10, 2009

Learning From Retail Email

If your nonprofit is raising much money online, you’re probably doing it via "old-fashioned" email campaigns, not social media (yet). And if that’s true, here’s a blog you might want to follow … The Retail Email Blog Written by Chad White at email marketing firm Smith-Harmon, this blog tracks email marketing campaigns of some 100 […]

Learn More September 9, 2009

No Heavy Lifting Today

In deference to our U.S. readers, who are coping with the official end of summer after a long Labor Day weekend, I have an easy-to-digest post today. Here are some videos dealing with social networking. The first is actually serious, suggesting the importance of social nets to all forms of marketing today. But all you […]

Learn More September 8, 2009

Medicins Sans Frontieres

I’ve been thinking about this video ad from Medicins Sans Frontieres, which has stirred up quite a bit of controversy on the Chronicle’s Give & Take blog and elsewhere. Here are my observations. First, a piece of advertising needs to be assessed against its objectives. If the objective here was branding, I’d rate the ad […]

Learn More September 4, 2009

Direct Mail Just Keeps Truckin!

Here are the stats on direct mail volumes from the latest USPS Household Diary Study (2008). As reported by the Center for Media Research, key factoids include: U.S. Households received 148.6 billion mail pieces in 2008, of which 63% was advertising. Income, education and age of head of household are the major drivers of mail […]

Learn More September 3, 2009

Magic Beans

I don’t know what set him off, but marketing maven Seth Godin recently posted an article titled Magic beans, TV and the web. Here’s the kernel: "On the web, there are countless marketers just standing around waiting for someone to hand them the magic beans. And that’s the problem. Marketing online takes too much measurement, […]

Learn More September 2, 2009