The Agitator

Last week, I raised the question of whether your donors relate to your organization as "friends" or merely "acquaintances?" The hypothesis being that donor loyalty requires building a "friend" relationship. I suggested a simple first step, like including photos of the ...  Read more

Here’s another prediction of the death of direct mail, as reported on frogloop. Says research firm Borrell, spending on direct mail will decline by 40% over the next five years. Get a move on direct mail fundraisers! In five years your medium will be dead. Just like radio. Forget this ...  Read more

We’ve been talking about the value of market (i.e., donor) research lately, and how/when to listen to it. So my curiosity was peaked when this article by Karl Greenberg, Market Research Must Get Real, Not ideal, popped up. The article cites Nathan Berg, a professor of economics at the ...  Read more

A recent study by Blackbaud’s Target Marketing on online fundraising (Roger commented here) noted that many donors who make their first gift online wind up making their subsequent gifts, if any, via direct mail. Agitator reader Dave Raley has a theory about this. I reproduce his comment ...  Read more

If anyone deserved more than one funeral, it was Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity. When I reported Millard’s death in The Agitator last month, I just wanted to get the word out the day his extraordinary life ended. The next day he was buried in a simple pine box at ...  Read more

We’re seeing some discussion by fundraising consultants of their clients’ year-end results. Here are two examples … M+R Strategic Services (look for "Ups & Downs of Online Giving") talks about theirs … with interesting results from Oxfam America. And Nick ...  Read more

No one knows for sure what makes for great viral marketing. And those who claim to know are usually wrong. One thing’s for sure, the message and the technique not only have to shock or surprise they have to glide along on top of the current wave and capture the moment just like any ...  Read more

Here’s some data re online video used by BrightRoll, the internet’s biggest online advertising network. 1. Video is Bigger Than Search: 12 billion videos are watched per month vs. 10.5 billion searches conducted. 2. Video Consumption is Quickly Moving Online: 19% of total video ...  Read more

  The maxim very successful fundraisers live by was set forth by George Bernard Shaw 80 years ago: "The mediocre borrow, genius steals." In short, when you see a winning concept, campaign, technique, whatever, just steal it. Adapt it. Run with it. Which brings me to today’s ...  Read more

Agitator aficionado Bob Roth alerted us to a piece in e-Marketer reporting on the just-released “2008 Channel Preference Survey” from email marketing firm ExactTarget.Bottom Line: The preferred personal comunications channels — phone, email, text and instant messaging — are ...  Read more