Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Plastic Bag Bans and Your Fundraising Problem

The common fundraising bias is to focus on small problems, easily reduced – the conversion on your landing page, the response rate on your control mailing. This last mile focus means we often miss related, larger behavior problems – i.e. the upstream problems. Is the larger conversion problem tied to overfishing the same acquisition waters, […]

Learn More June 25, 2021

Donor Service: Walking the Talk

For years we’ve stressed the importance of good donor service when it comes to donor satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value. In earlier posts here and here, we pointed out that poor donor service accounts for a significant part (20%) of why donors drop out. There’s simply no excuse for organizations losing nearly 20% of their defecting donors because […]

Learn More June 23, 2021

Does the donor sign up experience impact sustainer retention?

If you think donor experience matters to sustainer retention then the vague term needs to be broken down into specifics and we need to get more precise. Let’s start with context. Consider a telefundraising campaign to convert digital petition leads to sustainer. Mental exercise: Name two parts of the call experience that have a statistically […]

Learn More June 21, 2021

A Perfect “How-To-Book” is Born

Tom Ahern is a prolific author of some of the most provably practical fundraising how-to-books in our sector. I have gifted literally scores of Ahern books to colleagues and clients. For good reason. They’re packed with valuable insights and profusely illustrated with helpful examples. Among my favorites is Tom’s Making Money With Donor Newsletters for […]

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How to Have More Winning Tests?

Stop designing tests assuming everyone’s the same. 99.9% of tests are of this variety, the random nth, A/B test. Hidden in many “losing” test results is a test idea that worked for some people and not others. Here are results of an experiment with donations going to World Vision and prospective donors randomly split into […]

Learn More June 18, 2021

The Value of a Fundraiser

Almost every sector of the economy is now facing the issue of how many employees will actually return vs. how many will simply opt for greener pastures. If the financial meltdown of 2008 was the Great Recession, will almost-post-pandemic- 2021 turn out to be the Great Resignation. Virtually every part of the nonprofit sector – […]

Learn More June 16, 2021