The Agitator

If your data indicates that most of your small gift income still comes from direct mail, and you think most of your donors are over fifty years old, but you sense more and more online interaction with your donors is happening (and more is possible), then whose online practices might you pay special ...  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

A few days ago we published a post called the Secret Millionaire in Your File … all about an "average" donor who — out of the blue — left a seven-figure bequest to her alma mater. I stress "average" because this was an individual of no obvious wealth, BUT ...  Read more

Over the weekend Tom sent me a link to an ABC News piece entitled “Secret Donor”. Diane Sawyer sets forth an absolutely charming and moving story  about a Lake Forest College alumna named Grace Groner who died in January  at age 100 and left the college $7 million.  ...  Read more

In the process of answering the essential “who”, “what”, “when”, “where” and “why” questions in planning a fundraising program or campaign, most of us begin with the identification of the prospective audience. In short, “Who&rdquo ...  Read more

I promise … after today, we’ll give the donor pyramid a rest. Except that next week Roger will pull together some thoughts on the underlying issues raised this debate of the past few days on The Agitator. For now, Ken Burnett gets the last word on The Pyramid, and discloses the true ...  Read more

The debate continues. I hope you’re reading the comments on our Agitator posts this week. But whether it’s a donor pyramid, trapezoid, ladder or bucket, no one is going to donate, at any level, whatever tactics  fundraisers throw at them, without effective messaging. Now, most ...  Read more

Here’s yet another view on Donor Pyramidgate … the debate over where major donors actually come from … and how to depict their evolutionary path graphically. It appears fundraisers take their geometric preferences quite seriously! As you can see here, Kristin McCurry of MINDset ...  Read more

Yesterday’s Agitator post on the donor pyramid (Is it a lie?!) prompted quite a response, so we’ll stick with this debate a bit. Commented John Sauve-Rodd (a Brit): "Personally I find the donor pyramid of no practical use, but as seasoned US and Canadian fundraisers told me in my ...  Read more

Mark Rovner at Sea Change Strategies recently wrote that the "fundraising pyramid is a lie." He argues that most major donors are recruited into a nonprofit on a peer-to-peer basis, rather than being cultivated up the donor pyramid from initial small gifts. From my experience, I think ...  Read more