The Agitator

Here is a useful article via Marketing Sherpa regarding best practices for email fundraising. It’s focused more on the copywriting aspects of email appeals.One thing this checklist drives home for me is the importance of testing email subject lines. These “headlines” are crucially ...  Read more

In 1995 Clayton Christensen coined the terms “disruptive technology” and “disruptive innovations” to describe technological innovations, products or services that use a “disruptive” strategy rather than “revolutionary” or “sustaining&rdquo ...  Read more

I finally got through my reading pile to a report released about three weeks ago by Convio, Sea Change Strategies and Edge Research. The Wired Wealthy is an important study of the online behaviors and preferences of major donors (i.e., individuals giving cumulatively $1000 in a year ...  Read more

Over at Tactical Philanthropy Sean Stannard-Stockton relates a conversation in which a major foundation grantmaker told him it was a primary value of the foundation to not harm grantees. The context was Sean asking whether philanthropists should speak out about nonprofits they considered to be ...  Read more

If you follow American politics and the tactics of the presidential campaigns on and off the web, you’re aware of ways they savage each other.  But, have you really thought about how these same tactics can be easily and effectively used against your organization? Are you really ...  Read more

Thanks to Margaret Battistelli at FundRaising Success for publishing these twelve best practices for e-efforts. They're proffered by Tom Gaffny, EVP for fundraising at Epsilon. As part of his homework, Tom made online contributions to 145 nonprofits and tracked their subsequent actions ...  Read more

Last week the fundraising, marketing and communications blogs were abuzz over the current state of fundraising and marketing in the non-profit world. The firestorm was mostly centered on the question of whether direct mail is dying, dead or simply changing and what to do about it. Well, if direct ...  Read more

You wouldn't blitz a major direct mail acquisition package to hundreds of thousands of prospects without testing, would you? I hope not! Then why would you offer a website — probably your major gateway to the public (and your members) these days — without testing its effectiveness ...  Read more

“Can't we all just get along?” asks Kim Cubine of direct response fundraising agency Adams Hussey. She's commenting on yesterday's Agitator post, which referenced the “Great Debate” at recent Bridge Conference between direct mail and online donor fundraising ...  Read more

Jeff Brooks at Donor Power Blog just did a post that spiked my blood pressure. He — correctly — took to task a report that, over a one year period, UK nonprofits earned merely 39 cents in donations for each $1 they spent on direct mail (and 44 cents for each $1 spent on all direct ...  Read more