Award Winning Blog - Agitator

How NOT to Be Relevant

Minutes, hours passed. Finally, damn near a day after the tragedy of Virginia Tech's massacre, the Brady Campaign, the voice of America's hand gun control movement, at last weighed in. All of which raises questions: Do they get it? Why so late? We can only imagine the internal debate. Will we be seen as “opportunists” […]

Learn More April 25, 2007

Offer Expires April 25

Attention nonprofit marketers! Still looking for your viral marketing home run? Marketing Sherpa offers a great report on online viral marketing, based on a survey of nearly 3,000 marketers. You'll see what tactics your commercial brethren have found most effective, what they pay for “cool microsites” … the #1 tactic (electronic postcards are so yesterday!), […]

Learn More April 24, 2007

Learning From Competitors

Competitors?! That's a nasty word in nonprofitland. We're all one big happy family, aren't we? Our boards want us to cooperate with other groups in our field. Our major donors urge us to collaborate, even while investing in us as “the best.” By nature we tend to be huggers and team players. But it's a […]

Learn More April 23, 2007

Direct Mail Fundraising As It Should Be

Here's how a 73-year-old nonprofit brand, Easter Seals, keeps itself fresh and successful in the mail … Testing, testing, and more testing. This review from Inside Direct Mail of the current control package used by Easter Seals for prospecting describes the careful testing that yields an acquisition package delivering 3.8% response. Are you testing enough? […]

Learn More April 20, 2007

We’re Watching You

Nonprofit fundraisers seeking to raise money online will need to master a blossoming art called “behavioral targeting” (BT). In a nutshell BT involves tracking netizens as they browse the web (that's their online “behavior”), using the electronic cookies they accumulate in that process. This information is combined with aggregate demographic information about the sites visited. […]

Learn More April 19, 2007

Online Fundraising Ain’t A World Apart

There's a lot of buzz already about the online fundraising success of the presidential contenders, with Obama, Clinton, Edwards and Romney leading the pack so far. The buzz treats “online fundraising” as something independent of and a world apart from “traditional” fundraising. But that ain't true. I've launched the small gift fundraising programs for a […]

Learn More April 18, 2007