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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Lang Chngs. <3 & actn r 4 evah

By the time we met…the times had already changed – Arcade Fire, We Used To Wait My daughter Sadie spent a few precious minutes (as long as she ever sits still) on the lap of her great grandfather recently. They shared their love of the natural world looking at the bright orange Oriole and the [...]

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Dear Ms. Nit-Picker…

(Please note: all similarity to you or your cause is purely coincidental.) Dear Ms. Nit-Picker, This is an open letter to charity staff members who edit fundraising appeals. With special focus on those of you who aren’t direct response fundraisers or have a clue about fundraising strategy. Just like with my Dear Mr. Fancypants blog, [...]

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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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Ten things we’ve learned from being Agents of Good

Our great pal and uber-passionate fundraiser, Josh Bowman who works along side the great folks at Second Harvest in Toronto has the market covered in Top Ten lists on his blog. This month he has been posting Top Ten lists from some of other favourite friends, bloggers and colleagues and we are honoured to be [...]

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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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