Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The Best Story Wins

It’s not the best ideas or the most innovative thinking or the best ground game or operational plan. It’s story. The charitable organization world is one with almost no barrier to entry and massive, diminishing returns. The number of nonprofits has skyrocketed while the number of people giving has dwindled. You don’t need a new […]

Learn More January 19, 2022

Does Your Lead Generation Attract the Best Donors?

Given the tsunami of petitions, surveys and other devices flooding both my postal and digital mailboxes it’s clear that more and more organizations are turning to lead generation as the first step in their donor acquisition programs. The question, of course, is just how well do these leads convert to good donors? And what steps […]

Learn More January 14, 2022

Are You Fundraising At or To Your Supporters?

This question of ‘at’ or ‘to’ struck me when reading a report from a UK agency that ran ads for a US animal rights advocacy charity. I found the thinking behind the ads and the testing to be wildly superficial and uninteresting and almost certainly leaving lots of money on the table. But, I realize […]

Learn More January 12, 2022

A Low Risk, High Reward Approach to Fundraising

In recent years we’ve tried to show how breakthroughs in research, particularly in behavioral science enable knowledgeable fundraisers to reap some mighty impressive rewards that come from a more in-depth understanding of “why” a particular donor gives (identity), why different messages are required for different donors (personality/psychological profiles) and how these elements are used in […]

Learn More January 10, 2022

What Works Best: The Spoken or Written Word?

We know that all fundraising writing or speaking should be conversational and personal. It should avoid long words, nouns, prepositions and adjectives that all make the copy feel dense. But which approach works best? We’ve scored lots of copy and transcribed phone conversations that follow written scripts. Neither has an inherent legup on being conversational […]

Learn More January 7, 2022

Corporate Political Giving: A Threat to Democracy or Just a Study in Hypocrisy

A year ago, following the January 6th mob attack on the Capitol we noted in Funding the Insurrection, “Money in politics is a very powerful force. So is withholding it.” Back then we wondered how corporate donors and their political action committees (PACs) would react to those 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election. […]

Learn More January 5, 2022