Award Winning Blog - Agitator

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

Humility in Numeracy

Numeracy, defined as a basic understanding and ability to work with numbers, matters. The less numerate earn less and have less wealth. They’re also more likely to have chronic disease, take more prescription drugs and be less able to follow the (partly numerated) instructions, thus adding more health risk. Some of this is conflated with […]

Learn More June 14, 2021

Update on the Cost of Embalming An Elephant

I know that’s a strange headline, but I wanted to call your attention to something so basic that I’m constantly amazed so many fundraisers simply overlook it. I’m talking about the basic data of our trade – names, addresses, deceased donors and fundamental demographics—the very “simple” stuff that makes the difference in any donor communication […]

Learn More June 11, 2021