Award Winning Blog - Agitator

AGITATOR WEEKEND: Online Fundraising Bonus

The Agitator’s Week in Review. This was a week that began and ended with drama and suspense. In Washington, D.C. “The Bailout” which went down in flames on Monday rose from the ashes on Friday amidst a torrent of fear and loathing on Main Street. In between, in St. Louis, millions glued their attention to […]

Learn More October 4, 2008

Online Fundraising On MySpace

MySpace, with 120 million users, has teamed up with PayPal to introduce a fundraising widget for individual and nonprofit members to use on their MySpace sites.They seem to be promoting it to celebrities to create some buzz.Here’s an example of the widget singer Hilary Duff is using to raise funds for St. Jude Childrens Research […]

Learn More October 3, 2008

Is Email Dead? Or Just Dying?

Just when online fundraisers are beginning to get a handle on email fundraising (testing customization, subject lines, etc), a new challenge is raising its head.Large numbers of netizens are abandoning their traditional email and choosing instead to message directly via their social networking sites. It’s like having cell phone users disappearing from your outbound telemarketing […]

Learn More October 2, 2008

Online Prospecting – Prez Candidate Style

Candidates McCain and Obama are aggressively using paid search word buys to court prospective supporters.Basically, this involves buying small text or banner ads that display when someone uses the relevant search engine — Google, Yahoo, whatever — to seek online info using a particular word or phrase … like “economic crisis” or “Iraq war.” A […]

Learn More October 1, 2008

Latest Fundraising Stats: Read ‘Em and Weep!

Target Analytics has just issued the results for its Index of National Fundraising Performance for the first half of 2008. Read ‘em and weep! · Fewer than one third (31%) of the organizations in the index had positive donor growth in the first half of 2008 –a continuation of the declining trend over the past […]

Learn More September 30, 2008

Direct response TV lessons

Historically, the most consistently successful nonprofit fundraisers using DRTV have been the child sponsor agencies — Save the Children, Worldvision, Christian Children’s Fund, etc.* Their campaigns effectively married strong emotional visuals and case statements with the sound ROI economics of monthly giving.I’ve always thought that animal welfare and protection organizations would be another logical candidate […]

Learn More September 29, 2008