Search Results for: ask less
AGITATOR WEEKEND: Terrible Week…Survival Tips
The Agitator’s Week In Review. This week the roller coaster that is the U.S. and global stock markets rocketed down, then up, on the news that The Fed, the U.S. Treasury and central banks worldwide pumped billions into financial markets ending a punishing week of financial panic…a malfunction in a 30-ton transformer temporarily halted huge […]
Fundraiser Refuses To Change Underwear
Following the example of tennis sensation Rafael Nadal, a leading nonprofit fundraiser is refusing to change his garb while he’s on a fundraising roll. Fred Krupp, CEO of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and a prodigious fundraiser, recently secured a gift of $15 billion over three years from obscure Cedar Rapids Iowa philanthropist Mordicah Crump, […]
Disruptive Technologies and the Innovator’s Dilemma
In 1995 Clayton Christensen coined the terms “disruptive technology” and “disruptive innovations” to describe technological innovations, products or services that use a “disruptive” strategy rather than “revolutionary” or “sustaining” strategies to overturn dominant or status quo products in a market. “Disruptive innovations” can occasionally come to dominate an existing market, either by filling a role […]
The Value Of Volunteers
Today’s post is by Guest Agitator Bob Roth. He’s trying to figure out a way to encourage volunteerism, in part by being more systematic in the way we place value on the work volunteers do. Bob fell into the world of internet marketing in the mid-1990s when the sole job requirement was being a hard-working, […]
Online Prospecting
Just read that GM, America’s fourth largest advertiser, has moved nearly 25% of its measured advertising spend to digital media over the last three years. That includes online ads ($197 million on these alone last year), home-page takeovers, search, sites for dealers and customer-relationship management. The reason? Targeting. In a typical month, roughly 11 million […]
What I Would Do First
I’m sure you’ve seen all the gloomy articles and blog posts floating around noting the threat to nonprofit fundraising posed by a sinking economy. A threat compounded by data indicating further fall-off in new donor acquisition and retention rates throughout much of the charitable community, as fellow Agitator Roger has commented on. Roger concluded his […]
Boomer Gloom Affecting Fundraising?
Have The Agitator and DonorTrends discovered the Fundraising Rosetta Stone … demystifing the real reason behind falling acquision and retention rates and other recent fundraising plagues? We think so. In reporting our 2005 DonorTrends survey three years ago, we noted that Boomers had climbed to the top of the donor heap, surpassing Seniors (born before […]
Database Marketing Reality Check
Nick Rongione of Kintera recently wrote this article in Fundraising Success extolling the virtues of truly integrating — and then actually using — all the data your organization captures, or could capture, about your supporters. His point: the more complete behavioral profile you can build of each supporter, the better you can target and customize […]
Online Campaigning … More Than Money?
The Wall Street Journal recently chronicled the ascendancy of small gift fundraising in the campaigns of Obama and Clinton. Everybody knows about the Obama online $$ phenom: about 90% of the $55 million he raised in February came from donors giving $100 or less … the vast preponderance online. Bur consider Clinton as well: in […]
What Makes People Give?
In the world of direct response fundraising we test and measure almost everything –length of copy, offers, asking amounts, teasers and headlines, etc. But in the non-direct response fundraising world there’s room for empirical improvement where myth, legend, hunch and intuition must give way to data. That’s why the piece What Makes People Give? in […]