The Agitator

I’m seeing more and more marketing articles these days that emphasize relationship building and seriously engaging “best” customers. Here’s an example from Seth Godin, where he discusses Fans, participants and spectators: “Likes, friendlies and hits are all ...  Read more

Yesterday I reminisced about the “old days” when a small handful of “big brand” media delivered the news that fueled the fire in the belly of donors to many causes. Through their coverage, those same media — NY Times, PBS, CNN, NPR — also provided the credibility ...  Read more

My nonprofit fundraising and communications experience has been grounded primarily in the world of advocacy organizations, as opposed to mainstream charities focused on health research, education and the like. And more narrowly still, advocacy of the center-liberal persuasion. For groups like ...  Read more

The recent e-letter of donor loyalty specialist Lisa Sargent describes how the Atlanta Union Mission builds relationships with its donors. AUM provides emergency food and shelter, residential recovery programs and transitional housing for men, women and children. Lisa’s article focuses on ...  Read more

Every year we give a plug to Nancy Schwartz’ nonprofit tagline competition. Gets hundreds of entries … might top 1,000 this year. Sometimes The Agitator even agrees on the winners! Here’s the place to enter this year. And there are more categories, so you can enter taglines for ...  Read more

Imagine yourself an investor being only able to follow the Dow-Jones Index on an annual or quarterly basis.  Not very helpful in today’s economic roller coaster. Well, fundraisers currently face much the same problem because, until now, virtually all publicly available information used to ...  Read more

Care2 is sponsoring what looks to be an intriguing webinar this Thursday the 17th, 2p eastern … The Networked Nonprofit. Content is based on new book by Beth Kanter (Beth’s Blog) and Allison Fine (writer on social change): The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting With Social Media To Drive ...  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 love these reports from The Boomer Project … they’re the Agitator’s agitator. While they almost never address fundraising directly, one need only scratch lightly to discover some implications. There are some great nuggets in this one. For example, I’ve just learned that ...  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