Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Are You In The Behavior Change Business?

Yes, yes you are. You are trying to change non-giving (at least to your org) to giving or giving of time to giving of money or quitting giving to restarting giving. For all behaviors needing to be changed. The only way to foster behavior change that sticks is by fostering high quality motivation. Motivation is […]

Learn More April 1, 2022

How Do You Know Which Sustainers are At Risk of Quitting?

Everybody wants more regular, monthly givers but do you know what an at-risk regular giver looks like? The non-answer on this is a “clawback” in the F2F, canvassing world which quickly became the number one channel for sustainer acquisition in the States (pre-covid) and always was in many other countries. The clawback is a full […]

Learn More March 30, 2022

Are You Undermining Donor’s Sense of Control?

People give of time and treasure. We know this to be true. A factoid in support: Americans donate over $310 billion and volunteer 8.8 billion hours per year. If you take the median household income in the US (67k) and the average hours worked in a year you see that the hours given are worth […]

Learn More March 28, 2022

Back to Normal

Covid changed everything. For a little while. The prognosticators claiming otherwise were seemingly trying to outdo one another with their hyperbolic goobly gook. Here is one such hot-take, “that one can talk about a global synchronisation of human behaviour establishing a completely new, universal change of consumer patterns.” Uh, yeah, whatever. A nod to Mark […]

Learn More March 25, 2022

Personas? Buyer Beware.

This post is sourced from an article I wrote for the Direct Marketing Association of Washington’s bi-monthly magazine, Marketing AdVents. I encourage checking out the DMAW membership offer. They produce a lot of good content with conferences, webinars and this publication. The only reason to group donors is because you believe you’ll be more financially […]

Learn More March 23, 2022

827 Years of Direct Mail in 40 Minutes,37 Seconds

“Power corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.” —Edward Tufte All of us who’ve suffered through interminable series of PowerPoint slides at conference after conference can certainly agree with Prof. Tufte, a pioneer in the field of information design and data visualization. HOWEVER….here’s an exception. A masterclass in 827 years of direct mail history presented in 40 minutes […]

Learn More March 21, 2022