The Agitator

In the case of many non-profits the much-vaunted “Fundraising Pyramid” too often resembles an hourglass.  Fat on the ends, skinny in the middle. So I was particularly pleased to see Nicole Wallace over at the Chronicle of Philanthropy recently tackle the subject of middle donor or mid-level ...  Read more

I was reading this article on effective email messaging, the gist of which was … make it relevant via personalization. Now there are a variety of ways to personalize, especially in (but not limited to) the online environment — using the donor’s location to tailor content, keying ...  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

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 we talked about going the extra mile to recognize donor loyalty. Here’s an illustration I didn’t want you to miss from Jessica Harrington at Schultz & Williams … "We’re absolutely doing this!  For one organization’s first renewal, we ...  Read more

I could easily spend a couple of hours each day reading articles (and books) on customer loyalty and loyalty programs in the commercial space. Here’s a typical example from DM News about companies like Target, Hilton, Best Buy etc and what they’re doing to capture more share of wallet ...  Read more

I love Todd Cohen’s Philanthropy Journal. Excellent range of content. I’m a faithful reader. But I hate this March 26 headline: Fundraising out of sync with giving habits Todd’s story leads as follows: "Technology is changing the way people give, with different ...  Read more

Early in March, we published Checklist Heaven, a post citing direct marketing wiz Denny Hatch on the value of checklists for direct marketers. Denny in turn had been inspired by The Checklist Manifesto, a book written by  Atul Gawande. All of this prompted UK’s John Rodd to go buy the ...  Read more

I was intrigued by this email fundraising appeal from Environmental Defense Fund (one of my alma maters), because it offered me some choice as a donor.   However, I don’t think EDF pushed the choice concept as far as they  could (see MyProjects for  a look at what real ...  Read more

In the direct mail channel, the thoughtless, non-strategic practice of tossing as many appeals and acquisition pieces as an organization can afford — regardless of long-term result — is referred to as "burn and churn." I’ve railed about that in earlier posts. For those ...  Read more