The Agitator

We're now a week away from the long-awaited mid-term elections. Conventional wisdom runs deep that the GOP will post big losses and the Dems will gain. Meanwhile, the remaing days of the campaign countdown will find millions of television -watching voters exposed every 10 or 15 minutes ...  Read more

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 ...  Read more

No, not by completing our Staying Ahead of the Curve survey (see right column, top). For that, you simply earn our gratitude and some insight into how your peers are doing when Agitator reports the results. For $1,000 or $100,000 in prize money, you need to win Carson Daly's (originator of ...  Read more

This post in Don't Tell The Donor really surprises us, since we generally find this guy quite insightful … hence his inclusion on our blogroll. Basically the post calls “total rubbish” the following comment by a writer for a local business publication: Today, nonprofits ...  Read more

Recently we ...  Read more

In 1906 Vilfredo Pareto made the observation that 80% of the property in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. With further embellishment, this morphed into the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule, which posits that for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. It's ...  Read more

Marketing creativity is a favorite theme of Seth Godin's, and his comments here nail it. Still, to his two creativity killers, I'd add a third: Fearful, unimaginative bosses. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Two (Make That Three) Things That Kill Marketing Creativity", url ...  Read more

Madonna is being villified for seeking to adopt an orphaned Malawi child. Here, from the Chicago Tribune, is a typical article, which disparagingly concludes: “When the public tires of Madonna's latest exploit and the media moves on to something else, little will have changed for Malawi ...  Read more

In an article titled “The Joy of Giving,” The Economist reports on brain research that seeks to explain the mental processes involved in making donations. Researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke used a standard technique called functional magnetic ...  Read more

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has released its annual Philanthropy 400 survey. Get your hands on the full report. But here, from the publicly released summary, are some highlights that impressed The Agitator: Donations to the largest 400 charities grew by 13% in 2005, to $62.7 billion (the ...  Read more