The Agitator

Yesterday The Agitator asked how donors might be sizing up their financial situation these days, given that some surveys indicate increasing optimism about the economy. Is the glass half-empty, or half-full? Here’s an article from the Washington Post that looks more anecdotally at the ...  Read more

Recent surveys on consumer confidence and expectations about the economy will separate optimistic fundraisers from the pessimists. Typical of what I’m seeing is this survey released last week by Harris Interactive. It reports that only 24% of Americans see their own household’s ...  Read more

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

In case you headed to the beach early last Friday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a financial conference that the economy — U.S. and globally — is on the verge of growing again. As reported here in the NY TImes, despite his upbeat tone, he did say the recovery would be ...  Read more

Here are two recent articles from Marketing Daily describing the current state of play of cause marketing in the U.S. In the first, sponsorship giant IEG projects that $1.55 billion will be spent on cause marketing in 2009. IEG cites survey data saying that 41% believe companies should increase ...  Read more

Here’s a great story from the Washington Post about young people — ages like 11, 12, and 13 — and their fundraising activities. Zach Bonner set out to help homeless kids in his area of Florida. Now his Little Red Wagon Foundation has generated 27 trailer trucks of aid, received a ...  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

No, says e-marketer Loren McDonald. Here’s an abridged list of what Loren says the successful email marketer really needs to know [with my comments from the peanut gallery]: 1. Email strategy — know how to create an email marketing plan and program that maximize the channel’s ...  Read more