Search Results for: ask less
Generational Labels Are Lazy
It’s a summertime (and Fall, Winter and Spring) Agitator tradition to tilt at windmills and lament the profoundly stupid use of generational labels. It’s Quixote”esque” because of the bullshit asymmetry principle: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it. But, we’re wearing our muck boots […]
What if Donors Could Give More Now and Pay Later?
A huge bonus springing from the BBB’s Wise Giving Alliance’s Heart of Giving Podcast are the windows host Art Taylor opens onto the personalities and motivation of folks who do the work, provide the charitable services, and come up with innovations worth exploring in our sector. Such was last week’s podcast featuring Dominic Kalms, the […]
Words Matter. Handle With Care.
Words have always mattered. In this highly partisan, explosively charged times they matter even more. Take the term ‘white privilege’. To some people it summarizes the combined effects of historical, economic, and cultural forces that allow a larger percentage of whites to climb the socioeconomic ladder than Blacks or Hispanics To other folks use […]
Digital Donor Abuse
With another batch of primary elections behind us and more still ahead…with the future of Roe v. Wade and reproductive rights hanging in the balance…with heartbreaking scourge of mass shootings at schools and shopping centers…there’s barely time to ponder the ultimate fate of life as we know it either by pandemic, famine, flood, locusts, or […]
Fundraisers Are Not In The Persuasion Business
Our business is fundraising. We try to get folks to engage in helping behavior, giving and doing. We are not in the persuasion business. If we were, we’d be out of business. As Jack Trout, famous ad man said, “if the job is to persuade people, don’t accept the job.” Our job is to meet […]
The Power of $.99 Not Created Equal
The consumer world is way ahead in understanding the science and psychology of price on decision making. Suffice to say what a person is willing to pay and how they feel about it is highly malleable. In our world there’s still a lot to learn and optimize for our price equivalent– ask amounts. We’re not […]
Hidden Threats to Democracy
A healthy democracy, as I pointed out in my last post, is a precondition for moving forward on most of the issues and causes we fundraisers serve. When democracy breaks, the systems, and institutions we strive to fix or improve become far harder or even impossible to repair or advance. The daily flood of human […]
How Much is a Prayer Worth?
There’s lots of talk about non-financial behavior– often dubbed “engagement”– and trying to understand the financial value of it. If someone likes or shares your post, reads your email, signs a digital petition and the list goes on and on…what is it worth? Religious charities often ask people to submit a prayer in some form […]
Personality Pseudoscience
No, not the Big Five model of personality traits that we use as a central part of our fundraising to divide folks on their innate traits and match message to audience. Unfortunately, the Big Five isn’t the most popular, well-known Personality test. It probably needs a new PR agent. Ever heard of Myers-Briggs? Almost certainly. (See […]
Which Words Do Females Know Better Than Males?
We admittedly geek out on the scientific study of words, linguistics. We’ve built the CopyOptimizer tool to score copy on Readability and Storytelling using linguistics. We believe writing is more work, effort, training, study and process than divine inspiration and stroke of genius, hence tools and rubrics that turn writing into more science, less art. […]