The Agitator

Writer and occasional fundraising consultant Ken Burnett has been struggling lately with Twitter. In this blog post, reproduced below with permission, he vents his frustrations and offers a solution. I thought you might enjoy his tribulations. Or as Ken asks:     Is it time for ...  Read more

To a communications or fundraising professional, "what is relevant" to my target audience or prospect is — or should be — the threshold question. Relevance to the receiver — not you the sender — is what determines whether your message or appeal has the remotest ...  Read more

Yesterday I suggested that competition amongst nonprofits for the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of donors might become more fierce; that this would be good for the causes served; and this trend would force more attention to communicating the core defferentiating qualities of competing groups. In ...  Read more

I was reading this article from Online Spin about the competition between Nielsen Online and comScore as to who has the biggest and best online panel for measuring online behavior. This is the sort of thing that market researchers can get quite passionate about. And indeed, given that marketers ...  Read more

Something possessed an Agitator reader to share this amazing goof with us. We’ll keep this person anonymous to protect the guilty, as well as the organization, to spare it (you’d all recognize it) the embarrassment. Here it is: "While with the [organization], I screwed up a ...  Read more

We welcome a Guest Agitator today, copywriter Lisa Sargent (www.lisasargent.com). Lisa has a bone to pick with nonprofits who try to write effective fundraising copy — themselves or through consultants — without an explicit creative brief to provide the essential guidance. She’s ...  Read more

Effective marketing begins with knowing your audience … whether it’s choosing mailing lists or appropriate media for your message, or crafting the message itself. Without a very clear understanding of the person, customer, or donor you are trying to reach, speak to and elicit a ...  Read more

Last week, I raised the question of whether your donors relate to your organization as "friends" or merely "acquaintances?" The hypothesis being that donor loyalty requires building a "friend" relationship. I suggested a simple first step, like including photos of the ...  Read more

C’mon, you really wanted to correct that headline, didn’t ya?  And it’s just that schoolmarm tendency in folks that makes for so much bad direct response fundraising copy. That’s the conclusion I draw from a fascinating dissertation by Frank C. Dickerson, Ph.D. as ...  Read more

Here’s an interesting column from Stuart Elliott of the NY Times regarding anger as a motivator in commercial advertising. It seems that commercial marketers are traditionally quite skittish about tapping into the palpable anger people feel about the economy. But the times might be ...  Read more