Award Winning Blog - Agitator

3 Lasting Gifts Under $2 for Your Donors

From monthly Apples and Pears to Zoo gift memberships my postal and digital mailboxes are filled with last minute tips for holiday gift giving. All of which got me thinking about gifts every fundraiser should be giving their donors. I’m not talking about calendars or stuffed animals or tote bags. Rather consider these essential gifts […]

Learn More December 13, 2021

Everybody Has Got a Story

Is there a more overused word than ‘narrative’ these days? I’ve tried to remove it from my vocabulary. Story is simpler anyway. So much of fundraising has no story. This isn’t conjecture. We’ve scored hundreds of pieces of copy and the Story Score (per Copy Optimizer) is dreadful and most often it’s not because the […]

Learn More December 10, 2021

The Uniqueness of Generations?

In an Agitator rarity, we give you the unabridged post of another, Bob Hoffman, whose profaneness is outdone only by an Agitator editor (or two). Enough said, here’s Bob. One of the great idiocies of the marketing industry is the belief in the uniqueness of generations — Gen X is this…Millennials are that…Baby Boomers are […]

Learn More December 8, 2021

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