Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Online Giving Peaks Next Week

I hope you’re not giving your online fundraising team time off next week.* As Stephanie Strom reported recently in the NYT, citing data from Convio, a phenomenal spike in online giving occurs at year-end … literally December 31st. Here’s what she says … "New data from Convio, a software company, shows that charitable donors that […]

Learn More December 22, 2009

More On Cheque-less Fundraising

My post last week on Britain’s plans to go "cheque-less" by 2018 generated a lot of comment (some publicly posted, some private emails), so I thought I’d summarize some of the key points made. First of all, it’s true. The Payments Council, a banking industry group in the UK, has announced its intention to phase […]

Learn More December 20, 2009

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