How do I create a political fundraising strategy? Part I
You’ll know you’re getting serious about your run for political office when you start to think about fundraising. For many, this can be an extremely intimidating prospect — it is certainly not what motivated you to run! Nevertheless, fundraising is critical. It is what fuels the rest of your campaign operation. It is what allows you to put your vision before hundreds, thousands, or even millions of voters so that they have the opportunity to evaluate their candidacy, and make an informed choice.
But where do you start? Without proper planning, your fundraising operation can completely consume your campaign and still yield disappointing results. Conversely, with smart planning upfront, you can maximize your ability to efficiently raise the funds you need to be successful.
In this article, we will walk through setting early- but realistic- budget estimates, and how to start thinking about the different fundraising channels you will use to meet your goals.
Set your budget
Fundraising will be and feel especially aimless if you don’t have a sense of what you’re raising towards. So even at the very start of this process before you know how every cent will be spent, it is important to generate some estimates that allow you to create some big goals.
Early on, rather than try to guess every expenditure you may want to make, review the public spending reports of a few winning campaigns that you can use as a benchmark for yourself. You shouldn’t limit yourself just to the campaigns that have run for the precise position you are pursuing, as that universe is likely not large or similar enough to your circumstances to provide great insight. So cast a wider net for this research, but consider the following things when pulling together these similar campaigns:
- The campaigns should be recent. Even campaigns conducted 5+ years ago can cost vastly different sums than what would be realistic today.
- The campaigns should be similarly competitive. How much a campaign costs often depends directly on how competitive it is. If you’re running against a sitting incumbent, for example, don’t assume you’ll be able to run with the same budget as someone who was running for an open seat.
- The campaigns should be for a similar office with similar constraints. Different positions tend to generate different levels of interest from donors — the same donor might think $200 is appropriate for a school board candidate, but $2,000 is appropriate for a state legislator, for example. And many positions also have contribution limits that will greatly impact fundraising, so look for campaigns with a similar set of fundraising regulations.
- The campaigns should be in a similar market. Obviously, the price of things is quite different from place to place, so find campaigns that have run in places where the costs of things a campaign might need (everything from labor to television ad time) are similar to your context.
Interviewing potential campaign staffers/consultants is also a great way to learn from several experts in the field about what they think a winning campaign looks like, and the budget it would take to execute it.
Know what you can spend
While at this stage you are primarily concerned with an overall budget figure, it is helpful to have some sense of how much your budget will allow you to spend on overhead. As they say, you have to spend money to make money. And some of the smartest investments you can make are early expenditures on your fundraising operation.
You should ultimately evaluate fundraising expenses (i.e., staff, consultants, software, events, etc.) based on how much more money they help you raise than you would have without them. But there is a rule of thumb for forecasting expenses that are not “voter contact” (i.e., your printed materials, advertisements, field program, etc.): they should represent about 30% of your overall budget.
So, if you’ve determined you think your race will cost $100,000 to run, expect to put about $70,000 directly into reaching voters. And get comfortable with the idea that your first $30,000 raised will likely be best spent on building your operation. Of course, as the campaign progresses, a more detailed budget will take shape and these estimates and rules-of-thumb should give way to that.
The three major fundraising strategies
Once you have a sense of how much you need to raise, you’ll next need a strategy for bringing those dollars into your campaign. Generally, there are three major strategic approaches you can take:
One-to-one outreach (AKA: “call time”). This strategy typically represents the overwhelming majority of funds raised by a political campaign — in fact, you should expect at least 75% of your budget to be raised using this approach. While it is called “call time” in political lingo, the name is a bit deceiving. Placing individual calls is certainly a big part of call time, but so is sending individual emails and text messages, or even making a personal outreach on social media platforms. The defining feature here isn’t really the medium, it’s the individual nature of the outreach.
The reason call time plays such a big role in most campaigns is simple: most people won’t donate medium and large sized contributions without a personal touch from the candidate, and 70–80% of campaign budgets come from medium and large sized contributions. Even if you’re expecting to have a relatively low-budget campaign and/or you expect to rely more heavily on small-dollar donations, it can still take a lot of personal prodding to amass the volume of small-dollar contributions you need to meet even a modest budget.
Another virtue of call time is that the return on investment (ROI) is pretty high — especially if you’re using smart tools, you can actually accomplish a lot of fundraising very quickly and at relatively little cost.
Mass outreach. By comparison, this strategy encompasses all the ways you might communicate with people in bulk, such as blast emails, social media posts, bulk mail, or paid digital advertising. Because of the necessarily impersonal nature of bulk solicitations and the competitiveness of these channels (think about how many mass emails you receive each week, or how many ads you see), they tend to convert only a tiny fraction of the recipients to donors, and they tend to be small-dollar contributions.
While much is made of the high-profile candidates who have raised enormous sums and percentages of their dollars from this type of mass outreach to small-dollar donors, it is important to note the role of volume to the success of this strategy. Because of the low conversion rates and the low contribution amounts, this type of outreach is usually only successful at an enormous scale that only a handful of campaigns will be able to realize each cycle across the whole country. Achieving that scale (especially in the absence of fame) is also incredibly expensive, so the ROI can be low.
That said, this channel should play a role in your fundraising — but it’s important to temper your expectations about what you’ll raise from this channel, and what it will cost to get there.
Fundraiser Events. Fundraisers are a sort of hybrid between mass and individual outreach. They are usually intimate enough that the candidate can have one-to-one personal interactions with donors, but they also allow for a group of people to all hear from the candidate at the same time. In that way, they have the potential to be very successful. In order to maximize their success, however, a good deal of work has to go into building the right host committee, ensuring a strong turnout of donors and high-quality prospective donors, and executing many logistical elements (i.e., invites, catering, parking, follow-ups, etc.). Because of this heavy lift, most campaigns aren’t able to rely too heavily on events as the centerpiece of their fundraising strategy — though, the more a campaign can streamline the process of building successful events, the higher the ROI and the more prominent this approach can be.
Understanding these three groups- their possibilities and their limitations- will help you determine how much you should expect to raise from each, so you can start turning your strategy into a plan.
And, of course, while breaking down your fundraising strategy in these three buckets is helpful for planning purposes, it isn’t realistic to believe that money will so neatly come in these isolated channels. Instead, you should expect them to overlap and should plan on doing work that integrates all of them. For instance, the best fundraising events are ones where the candidate does call time to help build the guest list beforehand.
Finally, one of the most important things you can do is just get started. Fundraising becomes a lot less intimidating with every concrete step you take towards reaching your goals. And you can read more of our articles and subscribe to our podcast for more free resources on how to get your fundraising operation off the ground.
You can do it!
