The Agitator

Having just watched The Netherlands eliminate Uruguay (justice being served IMHO), I moved on to reading fundraiser Mal Warwick’s latest newsletter. In particular, an article by Tom Ahern titled We don’t care what our donors think of us caught my eye. Tom talks about a recent ...  Read more

Back in November 2007 we ran a post titled, Snorting Oxytocin, with this lead … “Attention major gift fundraisers!! Next time you’re about to pop the question to a prospect (the fundraising ask, that is), squirt a dose of oxytocin up their nose. You might get two-and-a half ...  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

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

I like this advice from copywriter Ivan Levison, presented in DirectMarketingIQ. It’s simple, specific, and testable. He’s talking about the proven efficacy of the lift letter in direct mail, and offers these tips: Keep it small Fold it Stick to one point Keep it personal Have it ...  Read more

Nice to see this good news for the public TV sector, as reported in Philanthropy Journal. DMW Direct Fundraising reports an upswing for the 73 stations on which it has data over the 2005-2009 period. Revenue per 1000 pieces mailed was up to $295, and average gifts were $42. The public TV market ...  Read more

From DirectMarketingIQ, here’s an analysis of the direct mail stream over the past two years. The data are drawn from the 10,000 mail piece archive of Who’s Mailing What! The big news is that fundraising mail has flourished in comparison to other commercial mail over the last two years ...  Read more

The latest data suggests that Twitter has stalled out at 17 million users. Here’s a good analysis. Personally, I take this as a welcome sign that there is still some semblance of substance and sanity on the planet. If someone in your nonprofit is trumpeting the urgency of getting on board ...  Read more

Seth Godin did one of his trademark "short but sweet" — and provocative — posts the other day, titled, No New Customers. Here it is in its entirety … What if a rift in the time-space continuum changed the universe and it was suddenly impossible to get new customers ...  Read more

Since The Agitator has heaps of readers with .edu email addresses, I thought I’d pass along a blog post by Seth Godin especially for you! It’s called The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education (as seen by a marketer), and while it gives Godin’s full critique of today’s higher ...  Read more