Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Dear “Donor”: Stop Calling Me What I Don’t Feel Like

Teachers were asked by their school district to complete a survey. The experiment was a 2×2 design (one of our faves): The result? A nothingburger. No difference in survey participation between A-D, randomly assigned groups. But when researchers looked at an external variable, teacher effectiveness, the picture changed. More effective teachers, who were evenly spread […]

Learn More October 29, 2025

Donate, Donate, Donate – In Case You Missed the First One.

You need to repeat the ask. That’s one of the more durable recommendations I see, passed down like gospel. What’s to be inferred from this? Donors won’t notice the ask unless it’s repeated? They won’t know the intent absent many asks? Maybe its once for awareness, twice for clarity, three times for action? But what […]

Learn More October 27, 2025

Is Your Analytics the Eyeball or Factory Kind?

You run an A/B test, the Control pulls 5% Test pulls 5.3%. Maybe the test is better, maybe it’s just noise. That’s the tension we live with, trying to separate signal from noise and reduce uncertainty in picking winners and losers. So ask: If this result isn’t real, where did the noise come from? Was it […]

Learn More October 24, 2025

Ethics Awareness Month: The Great Scrape of 2025

In the words of the great singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, “Send money, guns, and lawyers — the shit has hit the fan.” We can safely skip the guns, but the rest feels uncomfortably on-point this October. As The Association of Fundraising Professionalsm (AFP) celebrates Ethics Awareness Month —one of our sector’s largest digital intermediaries, GoFundMe, stands […]

Learn More October 22, 2025

Fundraising in Hard Times: Lessons, Tactics, and Proven Campaigns

Let’s not kid ourselves. We’re in a perfect storm—economically, politically, socially, and institutionally—and it’s testing every organization’s capacity to endure or even survive. Trust is at a low ebb, public confidence is fractured, and for nonprofits, the ground beneath their feet is shifting again. In moments like this, I’m reminded why fundraisers exist in the […]

Learn More October 20, 2025

A/B Tests Pick Flavors, Not Lift

Thought experiment, turn fundraising off for a year – zip, nada, nothing. What happens? Revenue doesn’t hit zero, it decays. Long-time donors still give, some monthly gifts keep running, bequests arrive. That “baseline” money would come in even if you did nothing for a while. Yet, right now, it’s being credited to fundraising performance. Flip […]

Learn More October 17, 2025