The Agitator

Here's some interesting (yawn!) data (yawn!) on consumers' preferences (yawn!) for direct mail (yawn!, yawn!) over email (yaw …) WAIT! Did they really say consumers prefer to get direct mail over email?! According to (not entirely disinterested) Pitney Bowes, the answer is YES! ...  Read more

Todd Cohen at Philanthropy Journal fittingly nails the “sleepwalking” Smithsonian board in this post for its dereliction of duty in letting Larry Small run amok as former CEO of the place. As he puts it, that board was MIA. He warns: “Unless they start acting as responsible ...  Read more

I read Jeff Brooks' Donor Power Blog every day. His creative insights are terrific. He really gets the relationship aspect of fundraising. But occasionally Jeff gets it REALLY WRONG, as with his breathless advice the other day that we should all rush off to use the Headline Analyzer to punch ...  Read more

It's Monday … time for some mind stretches to get yourself “brain on” for the week ahead. Successful nonprofit marketers need to be sharp trend spotters … or at least avid trend watchers. Old fossils that we are, we at The Agitator have just discovered trend spotter ...  Read more

The contribution of new media to the quality of political discourse is vastly over-rated. I just got an urgent email from David Plouffe, Barack Obama's campaign manager. [There's the first problem ... like I care about the campaign manager! You might as well send me a message from the ...  Read more

Jeff Brooks at Donor Power Blog just did a post that spiked my blood pressure. He — correctly — took to task a report that, over a one year period, UK nonprofits earned merely 39 cents in donations for each $1 they spent on direct mail (and 44 cents for each $1 spent on all direct ...  Read more

Here's a pithy post on continuity giving from consultant Jim Killion, courtesy of DMA's The Integrator. Talking about the $$ power of monthly giving, Jim notes that credit card giving is the key to success, and suggests three tactics for maximizing your fundraising return: Tailored ...  Read more

Acolytes of the Myers-Briggs personality profile project that 51% of Americans are introverts. And even introverts in the nonprofit marketing biz face days when they must undertake that most dreaded chore … sell themselves! Many would say that the messenger is as important to successful ...  Read more

Last week we reported on the impact of video watched online … it gets people to do things! The data on online video use we cited was a year-old, ancient in the web timescale, so here's some new data from ComScore, from March 2007: 71% of US internet users, or 126 million folks ...  Read more

Thanks to Don't Tell the Donor, we saw a news report recently that the Republican National Committee had fired all 65 of its in-house telemarketers. Figures given by one solicitor indicated that 2007 phone contributions might be down nearly 40% from 2006. We wondered, “Is this just the ...  Read more