Each day five or six of us read dozens of news items, a half dozen polls and research studies and try our best to put together the 'editorial budget' for The Agitator.

Noble, sure. Effective, I'm not so sure. Why?

Each week hundreds of regular, repeat readers visit this site. You are folks who clearly want to stay abreast of what's happening. You are listening. That's nice.

But you don't talk back. This suggests a worrisome degree of lethargy and complacency that I fear reflects our trade. Please speak up. So much is at stake. Non-profits are failing. They're endangered.

And the biggest of them — the dinosaurs and woolly mammoths –don't seem to get it. Or don't respond. Apparently, they just want to go to lunch on their vendors.

What is most frightening to me is the number of over-fed, over-paid execs who run business-as-usual nonprofits who don't seem to either care or know they're presiding at the deathbed of the causes they're so highly paid to represent. Maybe it's more accurate to say their institutions are dying … the causes are likely to persist because the underlying needs and threats endure, and eventually new, more vigorous and more innovative champions will arise.

Three weeks ago we published a summary of Target Analysis Group's Quarterly National Index of fundraising. It clearly showed acquisition and retention in BIG trouble. Yet no one seems to want to listen or offer up ideas. Frankly, it's hard to believe that everyone's in denial.

Day after day we alert folks to the unfolding change that will alter the way we all do business. This is serious stuff. But, do we get questions? Pushback? Some, but not nearly enough.

What is really bugging me is my own ineffectiveness as a communicator, as a sort of Paul Revere of the revolution that is already upon us.

Help me. Help The Agitator. Help yourself. But most of all help the causes you care about. Jump into the discussion, please. The stakes are so high. Sleeping at the switch, remaining uninvolved, collecting a comfy paycheck while the Visigoths of Change are storming the walls is simply unacceptable.

May we hear from you? Please write, before it's too late.