Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The Danger of Mistaking Change for Progress

I’ll never forget the little old lady. Early in my career I called on her to discuss the college’s plan for a new library, hoping she’d become a major contributor. She served tea and little cucumber sandwiches. We chatted amiably and then got down to business. With great enthusiasm I showed her the architect’s schematics, […]

Learn More October 22, 2021

There are No Best Practices

That is our headline from an analysis of (newspaper) headlines that found no discernible pattern in determining what makes for winning headlines. I know, dizzying. The analysis was performed on a a big data set: 141,000 A/B headline tests run by 293 newspaper websites. The project was done by academics at Northwestern’s Computational Journalism Lab. […]

Learn More October 20, 2021

Gen Z to Save the Day

“There is a revolution under way . . . It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence. Its ultimate creation could be a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. This is the revolution of the new generation.” This was written 51 […]

Learn More October 18, 2021

Supercharge Your Giving Tuesday

With Giving Tuesday ( November 30) on your near-term planning horizon I’m hoping you’ll choose to think once, twice and even thrice before dipping into the Giving Tuesday Sea of Sameness by offering up one more of the hundreds of matching gift offers that will be indiscriminately dumped on donors. For starters I recommend you […]

Learn More October 15, 2021

Quantifying the Donor Experience At Scale

What gets measured gets managed. How many brands out there are regularly measuring donor experience? How many people read that last sentence and aren’t even sure what it means? You’d be excused, hell you’d be applauded, since donor experience is thrown around ad nauseam with little or no practical definition, much less linkage to fundraising […]

Learn More October 13, 2021

A Win for Old School Economics

Economics has been called the dismal science for decades. The somewhat newer slight (still decades old) led to the birth of Behavioral Economics whose guardians believe stodgy, old, Econ 101 principles of supply and demand and rational actors making rational cost/benefit choices fails to explain reality. Some of that’s true though the BE truthers out […]

Learn More October 11, 2021