Award Winning Blog - Agitator

“A Day of Rage”

Whether you’re marking July 4th, our Independence Day here in the U.S., or starting your day elsewhere on the planet, I can think of no more important way to spend 40 minutes than watching–then sharing — the remarkable video below. The video is the product of a six month investigation by The New York Times. […]

Learn More July 4, 2021

A Victory for Donor Privacy

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday sided with charities fighting a California law requiring nonprofits to provide a list of their larger donors to the state. In a 6-3 vote the court said the California law subjected donors to potential harassment and intimidation, chilling their 1st Amendment right of freedom of association. This decision —Americans for […]

Learn More July 2, 2021

Is Your Testing Divorced from Reality?

“If only we could get more people to give and do so more regularly.” ” Let’s devise a test. ” The HiPPO { Highest Paid Person’s Opinion; the one usually in charge) in the room says, “More people will give if we change the landing page to have more/less…text/pictures/fields.” “Great, we’ll do that test”, says […]

Learn More June 30, 2021

We Re-did the DonorVoice Website. Why Should You Care?

You shouldn’t…unless you’re interested in understanding why people give and using the insight to make your fundraising better. There is a case study here. You shouldn’t…unless you’re interested in using behavioral science to get beyond one size fits all fundraising. There is a case study here. You shouldn’t…unless you’re considering changing your own website and […]

Learn More June 28, 2021

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