When I read the comments Agitator readers make on our posts, I realize the huge diversity of our readership.

I just finished ‘moderating’ two recent comments that indicate the huge spread in reader interest and focus. Both are brief, so I’ll re-publish here to underscore a point.

Comment #1 from Kristen Smith at People For the American Way (regarding a post on the value of lapsed donors):

“Wow, I’m surprised this has not gotten any comments yet. We are very aggressive about re-activating our lapsed donors. Glad to know that we do pretty much everything on this list as well as the things you mention in your post. We do use a modeling service to data-mine our entire lapsed file (starting at 24 months and going back 30 years) and include the most qualified names in our acquisition mailings. These names often make a profit in the initial acquisition mailing (even taking into account the additional cost of the modeling — which is still cheaper cost/M than renting an outside list), they come in at a higher average gift than totally new names, and they have better retention and longterm value than new names. So — it’s a win all around.

We also do both reinstatement (2-5 years) and deep lapsed (6-10 years) telemarketing campaigns; the names we bring back on via these campaigns also have much higher value than other names acquired via telemarketing.”

Wow! This is a poster child of smart ‘traditional’ fundraising. I can’t think of anything to suggest to improve this reinstatement program. Just contemplate a moment the return on investment she’s describing … wouldn’t your organization treasure that?

Kristen is surprised that no one else commented on that post. I don’t know what to say to that. My only supposition is that the post was awfully damn boring and irrelevant … either a) everybody’s already generating huge returns from reactivating ‘lapsed’ donors (Duh, where have you been, Tom?!), or b) everybody’s too busy doing more lucrative stuff to improve their fundraising performance. (Please, tell me what that is so I can write about it!)

Then I approved Comment #2, from Jay Frost at fundraisinginfo.com (regarding my post on Twitter):

“Stop avoiding it, Tom! Twitter is a marvelous tool for nonprofits generally and will prove to be for fundraising specifically. If you need a tutorial, just send me a DM at @gordonjayfrost . That is, if you have a Twitter account!”

I see our web guy has stuck something on The Agitator that lets folks tweet our posts, and we seem to get some visitors to our website via Twitter, but otherwise it’s a mystery to me. I must have an account, because I get messages saying people are following me (maybe it’s a personal one), but I can’t locate it.

All of which is to say … Jay, wake me when Twitter has any fundraising importance that’s 1% as significant as getting your reinstatement program right. Then I’ll gratefully take your tutorial.

Until then, I’ll respect the view that someday Twitter might indeed have fundraising significance, and so I will continue to dutifully report on its progress.

Tom