The Agitator

Here are the stats on direct mail volumes from the latest USPS Household Diary Study (2008). As reported by the Center for Media Research, key factoids include: U.S. Households received 148.6 billion mail pieces in 2008, of which 63% was advertising. Income, education and age of head of ...  Read more

I don’t know what set him off, but marketing maven Seth Godin recently posted an article titled Magic beans, TV and the web. Here’s the kernel: "On the web, there are countless marketers just standing around waiting for someone to hand them the magic beans. And that’s the ...  Read more

Back in July, Mark Dolliver wrote this terrifically insightful article in Adweek regarding marketing to today’s age 65+ consumer. [Sorry, I'm just catching up to this, thanks to a mention by the Boomer Project.] Dolliver refers to this group as the Silent Generation (born 1925-42) ...  Read more

Convio is brandishing a new "fundraising calculator" that claims to compute the future value of your integrated direct mail, telemarketing and online fundraising stream. Says Jordan Viator of Convio: "The tool allows nonprofit organizations to estimate their online fundraising ...  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

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

Yesterday we reported the quantitative results from The Agitator’s Mid-Year Fundraising Assessment survey. Those responses indicated relative calm at this stage of the fundraising year. As Tom summarized: “Being an optimist, I would characterize the results as saying that seven-in-ten ...  Read more

In this recent post, Merkle creative director and blogger Jeff Brooks takes on Charity Navigator for whining about "junk mail" and for buying into the "myth that fundraising is a form of harassment." Right on Jeff! And he doesn’t just complain. He gives four very sound ...  Read more

Chuck Pruitt of A.B Data thinks the dire predictions of the death of direct mail are groundless. And he’s angry they seem to get such credence (though certainly that’s not the case in the annals of The Agitator … just Search our site using "direct mail’!) ...  Read more