The Agitator

I’m seeing more and more marketing articles these days that emphasize relationship building and seriously engaging “best” customers. Here’s an example from Seth Godin, where he discusses Fans, participants and spectators: “Likes, friendlies and hits are all ...  Read more

Yesterday I reminisced about the “old days” when a small handful of “big brand” media delivered the news that fueled the fire in the belly of donors to many causes. Through their coverage, those same media — NY Times, PBS, CNN, NPR — also provided the credibility ...  Read more

My nonprofit fundraising and communications experience has been grounded primarily in the world of advocacy organizations, as opposed to mainstream charities focused on health research, education and the like. And more narrowly still, advocacy of the center-liberal persuasion. For groups like ...  Read more

The recent e-letter of donor loyalty specialist Lisa Sargent describes how the Atlanta Union Mission builds relationships with its donors. AUM provides emergency food and shelter, residential recovery programs and transitional housing for men, women and children. Lisa’s article focuses on ...  Read more

Every year we give a plug to Nancy Schwartz’ nonprofit tagline competition. Gets hundreds of entries … might top 1,000 this year. Sometimes The Agitator even agrees on the winners! Here’s the place to enter this year. And there are more categories, so you can enter taglines for ...  Read more

I was intrigued by this discussion in Online Spin of “impulse” versus “considered” purchases in the consumer space. The author discusses this distinction in the context of what — and how much — an online pitch, ad or offer can accomplish in those two different ...  Read more

We often write about the importance of storytelling as the path into donors’ heads and hearts. Here, courtesy of fundraiser Fraser Green, is one more exclamation mark on the point! Says Fraser: “The ‘magic moment,‘ as I call it, is when the audience stops being an ...  Read more

It’s not exactly like we were sitting around wondering what to do with our free time (other than reading Chaucer), but when the request came from our colleagues over at DonorTrends to contribute to their new blog named Fundraising Action,  we leaped at the opportunity. We thought about the ...  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

Yesterday, in the course of making some comments about raising money from Boomers, I published this chart estimating the number of individuals in each cohort prepared by The Boomer Project. Today I want to make a different point about this chart. Today there are already more than twice as many ...  Read more