Award Winning Blog - Agitator

You Are Your Music

You are your music. More accurately, your music is you. This is cool research from Spotify finding that your personality predicts your music choices. Personality comes first, it’s mostly (not entirely) a born-with kind of thing. We all behave in ways that are trying to match our goals and values and orientation on the world. I […]

Learn More June 10, 2022

The Non-Political Twitterverse

Much ink has been spilled decrying social media rabbit holes and political echo chambers that threaten our democracy by increasing hyper-partisanship and extremism. What if that’s fake news? It’s true there are hyper-partisan people on Twitter. It’s also true many of these hyper-partisans are opinion influencers with big followings. The problem with the echo-chamber thesis […]

Learn More June 8, 2022

Why You Need Personalized Matching

Do you select, segment or do personalized matching? A definition is probably in order to answer that accurately. A big part of the distinction is whether you treat people differently or not. Selection is who is in/out for a communication. This is almost always tied to behavior data – e.g., RFM, hasn’t opened an […]

Learn More June 6, 2022

Biases and Nudges Work Differently for Different People

Do we sound like a broken record? People are different and yet we treat them all the same. I’m desperate to understand why this is as it’s been this way a long time and maybe that’s both the issue and the reason. A long time means a lot of well-worn habits and resistance to change […]

Learn More June 3, 2022

Only a Week?

I was struck, again, at how behavioral science is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in the nonprofit world. If you look at the program side of our sector you’ll see lots of examples of behavioral science at work. Hell, the UN has a behavioral science committee and a working group and a subcommittee and a steering […]

Learn More June 1, 2022

What Makes You Tick? What Makes Other Fundraisers Tick?

Back in 2013 the landmark study, Underdeveloped: A National Study of The Challenges Facing Nonprofit Fundraising, a joint project of CompassPoint and the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund sounded the alarm about the development and fundraising profession. The study presciently warned that instability in the nonprofit sector would result in 50% of the development […]

Learn More May 30, 2022