The Agitator

This week I’ve pitched the importance of leveraging your "missionaries" with new social networking tools as a fundraising strategy. I’ve also suggested ways to identify which of the 10-15% of your donors might be your missionaries. But missionaries have an additional value ...  Read more

OK, I’ve been harping for a few days on harnessing your nonprofit’s "missionaries" — and empowering them with online social marketing tools — to bolster your fundraising efforts. So, Agitator reader Patricia Perkins asked me, how would I find my missionaries in ...  Read more

We’ve been talking lately about using social nets like Facebook and MySpace as “enablers” that can equip a nonprofit’s strongest supporters – your missionaries – to help fundraise for your cause. In this instance, your nonprofit would be reaching out to its most ...  Read more

Yesterday I offered a hypothetical New Math for Fundraisers scenario where very committed donors (only the 15% who are self-described missionaries) are matched with an easy-to-use tool (assuming, per Pew Research, that one-third use sites like MySpace or Facebook) to conduct a whopper of a personal ...  Read more

Here’s a fundraising scenario and projection for you to play with. Assume your nonprofit has 100,000 active donors, 15% of whom are "missionaries" — that’s the proportion of donors who, in our DonorTrends survey, consider themselves active recruiters for at least one ...  Read more

I’ll bet most fundraisers — together with each and every commercial marketer on the planet — will send out more email solicitations in 2009 than you ever have before. The email In-boxes of prospects and donors will be inundated as never before. How can you help your email ...  Read more

I’ve been wondering whether there will be an "Obama Effect" on nonprofit fundraising. Will the enthusiasm about President Obama in so many quarters translate somehow into increased charitable giving? Although it would be awfully hard to prove, I think it might, for three reasons ...  Read more

Yesterday I suggested that fundraisers not go overboard with the resources you devote at this stage to social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. Here is some more caution. As reported by Mediapost, a recent study by market research firm IDG found that members of social networks ...  Read more

First, the good news. A recent "must read" data memo from the Pew Internet Project reports that 35% of American adult internet users have a personal profile on an online social network site … four times as many as three years ago. More detail on the percentages of online folks who ...  Read more

Beginning with the New Year, Tom and I have been pounding away on the subject of “loyalty." The term means different things to different folks. A key factor is likely to prove to be "involvement." ( We have a series of surveys and other analytic projects in the works which ...  Read more