The Agitator

The Agitator is often asked to endorse specific fundraising campaigns, and our policy is to respectfully decline. There are simply too many, we haven’t the resources to evaluate conscientiously, and who are we to pick and choose anyway?! It’s bad enough that we bombard you daily with ...  Read more

The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico has intensified the never-ending debate over just how close non-profits should get to corporate benefactors whose behavior is sometimes the antithesis of everything the non-profit seems to stand for. Although The Nature Conservancy has never hidden the fact ...  Read more

This report from Pew Research on managing personal online profiles is timely as a follow-up to our posts regarding donor privacy last week (here and here). As Pew reports, individuals are becoming increasingly aware of and sensitive about their online profiles, with many restricting access to ...  Read more

With so many nonprofits working Facebook into their marketing strategies, it behooves us all to keep an eye on their privacy controversy. Here’s an excellent report on the matter from Bloomberg. It notes that Facebook, now at 519 million users, shows no sign of slowing growth. Traffic was ...  Read more

Roger made an off-hand comment in his recent keynote presentation to the Fundraising Success Virtual Conference & Expo. He noted what he thinks are the two most important questions donors ask of a nonprofit: 1. Will my contribution make a difference? 2. Did my contribution make a difference? ...  Read more

Last week, in a piece entitled Is Your Favorite Charity Spying on You?, the Wall Street Journal’s “Smart Money” column set off a mini-firestorm in our trade over the use of data mining for prospect research and donor analytics. Among the tidbits of raw meat tossed into the WSJ piece ...  Read more

Last week in my Promise Me post, I urged nonprofit fundraisers to connect your "asks" as much as possible to specific goals. Then commit to your donor/prospect that your organization will break its back to achieve those goals, and report regularly on your progress toward them. Then I ...  Read more

Go ahead, make a commitment! That’s the advice of David Kravinchuk at the FLA Group, a Canadian fundraising consultancy. David argues that few donors these days give out of a sense of duty or obligation or blind trust, as older generations did. Today’s donors want to see results. If ...  Read more

Awhile back I saw this LA Times article about a new website/organization (is there a difference these days?) launched by Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s co-founders and online organizing whiz for the Obama campaign. But as I read about the site — Jumo, promoted as a venue for ...  Read more

OK, time to let your hair down. Matt at Matt’s Fundraising Blog offers these five qualities he would like to see in the top exec of any nonprofit: The Director must be passionate about a vision and able to communicate that vision in a way that gets people excited. The Director should be a ...  Read more