Award Winning Blog - Agitator

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

Paper vs Digital –Does the Medium Matter?

Does an ask for money or time get mentally processed differently depending on whether it’s a paper or digital ask? In a word, yes. A study done in China and the US found that the medium determines, in part, how willing folks are to help. They dubbed the finding the “good paper” effect, which likely […]

Learn More March 18, 2022

Don’t Ask if You Don’t Care About the Answers

Zero party data is the data that voluntarily comes from your donors. It’s their voice. You might say we built a company around the value of it. This data is proprietary, you don’t sell or trade it in the co-op mills taking in others’ mailing list laundry. You keep it to yourself and you use […]

Learn More March 16, 2022

Fundraising in Inflation and Under Threat of Nuclear War. 7 Survival Tips for 2022

Here we go again. The phone’s ringing, the email inbox dinging as colleagues attempt to figure out what to do in a world that more than ever seems to be falling apart. Over Agitator’s 15 years our readers have witnessed a litany of financial meltdowns (2008), pandemic disasters (2020) and now in 2022 inflation coupled […]

Learn More March 14, 2022

Fundraising Lessons From the Liberty Ship Innovation

Shipbuilding pre-WWII was akin to fundraising before mass market channels existed—highly bespoke and tailored to the buyer, time consuming and with non-scalable labor as the primary input. Necessity often being the mother of all invention, the shipbuilding industry in the United States underwent a radical transformation to meet the needs of the Allied cause. But […]

Learn More March 11, 2022

The Exquisite Corpse of Direct Mail

If direct mail is dead it’s one hell of an exquisite corpse. And, with each passing week it grows even more exquisite. Not that it’s ever died; just grown more valuable, important, and increasingly informed by more and more science. We’ve been on the direct mail soap box a long time, particularly urging small to […]

Learn More March 9, 2022