Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Listen To Your Donor? No! Maybe?

So, you go do this fancy survey of your donors and they say: 1) Scrap the newsletter, and 2) by the way, we don’t understand why you’re spending 80% of "our" money on program X … cut it in half. Do you listen to your donors (i.e., customers) and do what they say? If not, […]

Learn More March 27, 2009

“Must Read” Book For Fundraisers

We were going to write a shameless plug for direct fundraising maven Mal Warwick’s new book, but then we got this promotional message from Mal himself. He does a better job than we could. Just click here for his nifty presentation. Oh, the book. It’s called Fundraising When Money Is Tight. Timely as that sounds, […]

Learn More March 26, 2009

Too Important For Techies – II

Yesterday I wrote a post, Too Important for Techies, saying that online fundraising was in the wrong hands … techies. It stirred up quite a commotion, as you can see by reading the comments following the post. Including my DonorTrends colleague, Ryann Miller, who offers these thoughts. Sort of a plea for us to respect […]

Learn More March 25, 2009

Too Important For Techies

A recent study by Blackbaud’s Target Marketing on online fundraising (Roger commented here) noted that many donors who make their first gift online wind up making their subsequent gifts, if any, via direct mail. Agitator reader Dave Raley has a theory about this. I reproduce his comment below. My own — perhaps too blunt — […]

Learn More March 24, 2009

Truths & Myths About Online Donors

Last Wednesday the headline in a New York Times story proclaimed “Study Shows First-Time Online Donors Do Not Return.” Sort of a ‘dog bites man” headline since, truth be told, neither do first-time direct mail donors. That aside, Stephanie Strom’s NYT piece is worth a read by all fundraisers. And worth far more than a […]

Learn More March 23, 2009

Donor Involvement Yields Fundraising Dividends

The morning’s mail brought this from a loyal Agitator subscriber: “Team Agitator – I am doing some research for a client about how response rates on acquisition are impacted by packages that ask prospects to take an action in addition to giving a gift. E.g. signing or mailing a postcard to an elected official, making […]

Learn More March 20, 2009