Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Dealing with Donor Erosion

Most fundraisers don’t even need Artificial Intelligence, machine learning or the expensive gibberish of donor personas and clusters to drive away their donors. In fact, as Kevin pointed out in recent posts many of these gee whiz tech and “scientific” tools may in fact speed up donor erosion by lulling us into dangerous and attrition-filled […]

Learn More April 14, 2021

Finding the Globalist Identity

Identities. We all have lots of them. Our personal identities are not statistical groupings with random variables available to create potpourri gibberish. But sadly, that’s the route most agencies go and while that approach is deceptively alluring it’s still baseless nonsense. An Identity is something a person psychologically owns, a sense of self. The best […]

Learn More April 12, 2021

Are Your Ads Swimming in a Sea of Sameness or a Vibrant OCEAN?

People are different in their motivation and interests and yet the sea of sameness of one-size-fits-all fundraising dominates. The Control ad and a Test ad both going to a single audience; the unspoken assumption is that everyone’s the same. But what if the test failed because it did well with some people but poorly with […]

Learn More April 9, 2021

Preventing Donor “Never Events” by Focusing on “Always Events”

“Happy families are all alike; every happy family is unhappy in its own way.” That’s the opening line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and one of the most famous openings to a novel in all of literature. A solid statement; even though a bit grim. Tolstoy went on to examine relationships in 19th century Russia. He devoted […]

Learn More April 7, 2021

Donor Service – Human vs. Machine

Walgreens and AT&T are using your personal data to match you with the right customer service representative. And they are using something called the “break point” to walk right up to, but not over, the line where the customer will leave. They do this through analysis of tone and pace of speech. It’s only at […]

Learn More April 5, 2021

“We Grow Too Soon Old, and Too Late Smart”

That Dutch proverb popped into my head as I read our friend Erica Waasdorp’s piece Is the Interest in Recurring Giving Really Growing? It’s not just because Erica is Dutch, nor because she’s an expert in monthly giving. It’s because her reading of the just-released Nonprofit Pro’s 2021 Nonprofit Leadership Impact Study correctly raises […]

Learn More April 2, 2021