Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Helping the Cobbler’s Kids Get Shoes

The International Fundraising Congress (IFC) is in a financial pinch or worse. It’s main economic engine, a well regarded, in-person conference has been shelved for two years running and times are tough. They’re doing what all fundraisers do, fundraise. The seeming irony is the appeal seems awfully organization centric, not particularly personal and missing a […]

Learn More December 6, 2021

Solicitation Volume and Overhead Ratios

Most relationships are messy and involved. This applies to two people as much as it applies to two data points. The relationship is rarely linear and always up and to the right. Underneath those two data points are a myriad of other data points and beneath them, human beings such as donors and those working […]

Learn More December 3, 2021

Arriving Soon: A Choir of Christmas Angels –Update on Supply Chain Woes

These days the first thing Dutch fundraiser John van der Vlies of Keystone Consultancy does each morning is check the GPS coordinates of shipping container packed with 400,000 Christmas angels and bound for Rotterdam. . When I Skyped with John two days ago to check on supply chain and delivery issues in Holland he showed […]

Learn More December 1, 2021

We Are Our Digital Footprint

We are our Personality. Our behavior regularly reflects who we are as we make choices in keeping with how we view the world. For example, if you smile and have a background picture with human interactions and sports activities listed on your LinkedIn profile there is a near 100% you are extroverted. And that means […]

Learn More November 29, 2021

Monkey Business

Headline: Breakthrough study finds subjects do more tasks if they enjoy it and the quality of the work product differs greatly across subjects. And in other news, water is in fact, wet. The details of the study are a bit more interesting, if still obvious. The scientists discovered major individual differences in preferences – reflecting […]

Learn More November 24, 2021

Chip Craver: A Kindly Presence Dead at 77

My younger brother, Forrest “Chip” Craver, is dead. He would have turned 78 this week on the 26th. Covid-related pneumonia got him. Forrest E. Craver, III earned his living as a copywriter and fundraiser. But he was so much more. Chip was that rare and kindly presence whose outrage at injustice never dimmed, never gave […]

Learn More November 22, 2021