Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Outbehave Your Competition

NYT's Tom Friedman wrote a great column last week — actually more of a book review — about the individual and organizational transparency caused by living under a microscope in the internet age. In The Whole World Is Watching (subscribers only), he observes: “When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone […]

Learn More July 6, 2007

Beating Expectations

Recently The Agitator talked about whether or how nonprofits might observe the marketing maxim … underpromise and overdeliver. We invited suggestions about how this might work. Especially since nonprofits are so prone to overpromising as they attempt to break through the clutter and arouse donors. David Love and Jen Love offer this advice. David is […]

Learn More July 5, 2007

Tele-fundraising Rocks

Awhile back we interviewed Ken Whitaker of Public Interest Communications, asking “Is tele-fundraising dead?” To many fundraisers, too many, telephone solicitation is the neglected, even shunned, stepchild. But Ken asserted that tele-fundraising was alive and well so long as one used the telephone in the right applications. Recently, Matthew Guerin of Adams Hussey and Associates […]

Learn More July 3, 2007

How Does Innovation Occur?

It's Monday Mind Stretch time again. Here's an interview, courtesy of Guy Kawasaki of Mac marketing fame, with Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation. Interesting points: “Epiphanies” or “magic moments” are really the culmination of dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes and comedies that occurred to make the “Eureka” possible. Finding support for […]

Learn More July 2, 2007

Long Live Direct Mail

Here's some interesting (yawn!) data (yawn!) on consumers' preferences (yawn!) for direct mail (yawn!, yawn!) over email (yaw …) WAIT! Did they really say consumers prefer to get direct mail over email?! According to (not entirely disinterested) Pitney Bowes, the answer is YES! Here are the stats from a recent PB-sponsored consumer survey: 73% prefer […]

Learn More June 29, 2007

Who Owns Your Nonprofit?

Todd Cohen at Philanthropy Journal fittingly nails the “sleepwalking” Smithsonian board in this post for its dereliction of duty in letting Larry Small run amok as former CEO of the place. As he puts it, that board was MIA. He warns: “Unless they start acting as responsible stewards of the resources invested in advancing their […]

Learn More June 28, 2007