Award Winning Blog - Agitator

What the Hell is Cadence?

Cadence had its heyday in the 1800s according to the fount of all wisdom, the Google machine. But it’s making a heck of a comeback as it turned the corner from a musical, rhythmic usage to business speak, 101. What might we have lost in this talk of cadence for our direct marketing and […]

Learn More August 1, 2022

Behavioral Science > Nudging

Behavioral economics (aka “nudges”) is the observation that sometimes people behave irrationally. You can google it and find long lists, infographics and diagrams listing reams and reams of biases. It seems all the cool kids have a bias they invented. You can also find lots of non-scientists and non-researchers espousing expertise because they read a […]

Learn More July 29, 2022

charity: water Goes Mailing?, Part 2

Personalized Matching Findings Winning execution Openness, losing on Agreeable. The holdout group has no hard, incremental costs to service it – it’s all digital. The net or profit margin for the holdout in the winning Openness treatment is higher than the letter group margin. But, you got a lot more people “engaged” with the brand […]

Learn More July 27, 2022

charity: water Goes Mailing?

We did some very cool direct mail testing with charity: water. They’ve agreed to let us publish the results. Some things worked, others didn’t. We’ll share it all. This will be a two-part post but worth the ride and we’ll also combine both posts into a downloadable, single pdf for ease of future reference. charity: […]

Learn More July 25, 2022

If No One Came to Work Could the Movement Run Itself?

This tongue-in-cheek headline raises the question of just how effective progressive advocacy and social change organizations can be when a good part of their staff energy is focused on battling each other rather than advancing the group’s mission at this critical moment in history. This is particularly true when it comes to reproductive rights organizations […]

Learn More July 22, 2022

A Message Built of Concrete

Should your fundraising message be concrete and specific or abstract? Most would probably say the former and most would be correct. The better question is why? Why does being more concrete and specific with messaging versus generic and abstract work better? It isn’t enough that the answer to the first question (concrete or abstract?) seems clear […]

Learn More July 20, 2022