Award Winning Blog - Agitator

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

Jeff, You Boob!

I read Jeff Brooks' Donor Power Blog every day. His creative insights are terrific. He really gets the relationship aspect of fundraising. But occasionally Jeff gets it REALLY WRONG, as with his breathless advice the other day that we should all rush off to use the Headline Analyzer to punch up our headlines. Don't you […]

Learn More June 27, 2007

Voyeurgasm And Other Trends

It's Monday … time for some mind stretches to get yourself “brain on” for the week ahead. Successful nonprofit marketers need to be sharp trend spotters … or at least avid trend watchers. Old fossils that we are, we at The Agitator have just discovered trend spotter Michael Tchong at Ubercool, who shares some stimulating […]

Learn More June 25, 2007

New Media Campaigning … Issues Or Boobs?

The contribution of new media to the quality of political discourse is vastly over-rated. I just got an urgent email from David Plouffe, Barack Obama's campaign manager. [There's the first problem … like I care about the campaign manager! You might as well send me a message from the campaign mascot.] What's it about? Obama's […]

Learn More June 22, 2007