Start as you mean to go on

You’ve got your sleeves rolled up – you’re ready for your fall fundraising. You and roughly 161,000 other charities and non-profits in Canada. And you – and 161,000 other compelling, inspiring causes are also seeking new donors for your movement. Today, a few friendly reminders from your Agents of Good about donor acquisition that puts [...]

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10 Ways to Keep Your Donors at the Heart of it All

You’re entering the busiest time of year in fundraising. Which means, so is everyone else. Everyone is bombarding your donors with their messages, their missions and their important news… In other words, you need to be different, better and more important to your donor than everyone else to ensure you get heard. With that in [...]

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Are we being clear?

What happened to the concept speaking and writing plainly? Recently I sat on an awards committee where part of my role was to review the all of the applications… but I realized (especially after having to read 1 paragraph like 6 times) that somewhere we have lost our way. I’ve sat in boardrooms, I’ve read [...]

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Ruby Writes Back to Jack!

Last year, the Agents were thrilled to work with our partner in crime, Agent Kimberly Mackenzie at Ontario Nature on a campaign about ‘bird strikes’ in Toronto – migrating birds getting killed into office buildings. Our approach was to have “Ruby” the Hummingbird write to donors, and include a map of her journey. A few [...]

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Holy Beep!

Holy Beep! Successful projects rock. And while it does feel a bit like beeping our own horn, when we celebrate our success here at Agents of Good, it is all the more awesome because in our work, it also means that the world is a little bit of a better place. And in the case [...]

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Adventures in Election Direct Mail

I wasn’t sure if I was going to blog about the election. Because the content sucks. I watched the debate. Boring, entitled white guy backpedals and blames the other guy. I follow the candidates on Twitter. Broadcast, broadcast, broadcast. But now the election is coming into my mailbox. You’re on my turf now. I could [...]

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Small and Mighty!

Leah Eustace of GoodWorks Co. asked us to work with her on this post about why small shops (charities) are way more WICKED than the big shops… you’re more nimble, you’re usually not as silo’d, you tend to be a little more chilled and relaxed, you care for each and everyone of your donor more, [...]

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Das Mail

So I recently bought a new car. A VW Golf Wagon. Just the right balance of race car (6-speed turbo diesel engine) and mom car (room for my 2 kids and our shaggy dog). I came home to this in my mailbox. Wrapped in that old-school brown paper, hand-taped. A stamp from “Wolfsburg, Deutschland” on [...]

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Channel vs Campaign

“Direct mail is dead.” “Social media is going to change the world.” “Online is the only way to go.” “Our donors don’t give to mail.” “Telemarketing doesn’t work.” “No one watches DRTV.” After a few meetings this week and a bunch of reading, I am astounded at how much attention is given to specific channels [...]

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Stunning Simplicity

A quick post today to remind us all about the beautiful simplicity of fundraising. It is so easy to get turned inside out and upside down thinking about integrated campaigning, multi-channel fundraising, over-thinking our approach and completely rush past one stunningly obvious thing: asking for one thing. One of our clients established a monthly giving [...]

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