Award Winning Blog - Agitator

How To Say Nothing In 500 Words

This is a "chain post" for lack of a better term. I went from this Seth Godin post, to this Doshdosh post, to this essay. Skip right to the essay for some great advice on how to sharpen your writing. Preview of top three tips … Avoid the obvious content. Take the less usual side. […]

Learn More July 14, 2008

She Planted Trees So Others Could Enjoy The Shade

This morning our friend and long-time colleague Polly Agee, 61, will be buried in the National Memorial Park in Falls Church, Virginia Personally we mourn her death (and have had quite a good wake telling “Polly stories”), but we most of all want to note her passing because she contributed so much to the small, […]

Learn More July 10, 2008

Email Marketing – Top 10 Mistakes

From Loren McDonald at Silverpop, an email service provider, here are ten big email design & marketing mistakes to avoid: Making it difficult to unsubscribe. No "welcome" message and/or waiting weeks to send the first message. Overmailing. Using a large single image as the core of your email. Not using alt tags. Relying on graphical […]

Learn More July 9, 2008

Buy Dove

I’m an unabashed shill for Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, which aims to improve the self-esteem of teen girls. The Campaign plans to reach 5 million girls by 2010, with most outreach through the Girl Scouts. Dove’s Self-Esteem Fund will spend $1.5-2 million this year. Are they doing enough? Dove will rake in $2.5 billion […]

Learn More July 8, 2008

The Latest Wake-up Call

At the very time when the stock market is dropping, unemployment is rising and fundraisers are attempting to read the tea leaves in preparation for next year’s budgets, Target Analytics has released their Index of National Fundraising Performance for the 1st Quarter of 2008 … and the picture ain’t pretty. Not only did the number […]

Learn More July 7, 2008

Bringing Donors Closer To The Cause

Mal Warwick’s e-newsletter is always full of excellent practical direct marketing advice for fundraisers. Mal has been running a series featuring online fundraising and engagement "best practices" as seen by Tom Gaffny, EVP at Epsilon. You should tune into this series, where Tom is walking through his top twelve techniques for bringing donors closer to […]

Learn More July 3, 2008