Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Persuasion is an Uphill Battle

Jack Trout was a TV ad man who helped pioneer the concept of brand positioning who famously quipped, “If your assignment is to change people’s minds, don’t accept the assignment.” Seems he knew what he was talking about. A huge study of TV effectiveness on changing people’s attitudes and beliefs about social issues found it […]

Learn More February 2, 2022

Story Success? Go Fast, Light & Straight

Story matters. We’ve noted that time and time again with data to support what we all believe. It’s simple to say, simple to agree with and yet, our story telling in the sector is lousy with average Story scores of under 50 on a 0 to 100 scale, per our Copy Optimizer. We clearly need […]

Learn More January 31, 2022

The High Cost of Sacred Cows

Let’s make a wager. I’m betting there’s no more than one out of every 1,000 disease or health care nonprofits in the world with the guts or leadership to follow the process I’m about to outline. It’s donor-centric but also so very, very counterintuitive to what most organizations would—but should—do. I’m certain (sadly) that my […]

Learn More January 28, 2022

Are You a Normal Distribution Thinker in A Power World?

We report average gift as gospel. And if the giving by your donors looks like the normal, bell curve on the left then average and standard deviation (how tall or wide is the middle part) will have told you all you need to know. This world view assumes the outliers are distraction. How many times […]

Learn More January 26, 2022

The Prettiest Picture Wins

Fundraising is numbers, lots of them. Packaging and presenting data is a part of the job description. There’re reams of evidence that physical appearance matters to all sorts of decisions and outcomes and as it turns out, this holds for our data pictures too. Pretty wins and it’s because of the halo effect where we […]

Learn More January 24, 2022

Great Guides to Storytelling

As Kevin noted in The Best Story Wins smart fundraisers pay serious attention to storytelling for the simple reason that better stories raise more money. Fine writing and Great Story Telling has always been in short supply in fundraising, particularly in these days of too many e-mails, too much Twitter and such. EVEN WORSE … […]

Learn More January 21, 2022