The Agitator

Pew Internet Research has released survey results indicating that 40% of adult American cell phone owners now use their cell phones to access the internet, email, or instant messaging. 34% (up from 25% in 2009) use their cellphones to access email. With outbound email appeals still the workhorse ...  Read more

Here’s the lead paragraph from a recent article in Fast Company: "Anyone–and I do mean anyone–can sign up to use Square and begin accepting credit card payments. Here’s how it works." It’s about a device from SquareUp.com that you (or say, your canvassers ...  Read more

Yesterday the Chronicle of Philanthropy was reporting $210 million raised in the first six days after the Haiti earthquake (for comparison, $457 million was raised in the same timeframe after Katrina). The lead sentence of their story caught my eye: "Contributions continue to pour in for ...  Read more

The Chronicle of Fundraising is doing an excellent job of monitoring giving response to the Haiti disaster. Here is their report as of January 16: "So far, donors have contributed more than $150-million to major U.S. relief groups, a Chronicle tally finds. By comparison, such charities had ...  Read more

We’re departing from our pre-announced “schedule” today to express our own concern for the people of Haiti … and our gratitude to the millions of people — including, we suspect, our readers — who have responded to this disaster with financial aid. The initial ...  Read more

Here are the responses to date of our one-question survey regarding Twitter : Which statement about Twitter to you most agree with? Twitter is a killer app and will become hugely important to nonprofit communications and fundraising going forward — 38% Twitter will be only marginally ...  Read more

On Friday, the White House signed on to Twitter (as well as Myspace and Facebook) – the latest high profile poster on the world’s fastest growing social network. Twitter traffic has already more than tripled in 2009.  In fact, over the past 12 months, traffic to Twitter.com has ...  Read more

The Pew Internet Project has come up with a new typology for users of information and communications technology (ICT). Pew sorts folks into ten groups, distributed within two main buckets. The chief determinant of which bucket you fall in is your attitude toward and usage of mobile ICT ...  Read more

  The Agitator’s Week In Review.  This was a week for politics, beginning with the Washington, D.C. soap opera over the on-again-off-again bailout of the  U.S. financial system and ending with the on-again Presidential Debates in Oxford, Mississippi. Regardless of where you ...  Read more

Here is a fascinating report from Pew Research Center indicating the bias of cell phone-only respondents to political polls.Pew has conducted three surveys on presidential candidate preferences since the primaries ended. In each case, they isolated the responses of individuals who reported using ...  Read more