How do I create a political fundraising strategy? Part II
If you’ve read our previous articles, then you know how to come up with a rough initial budget for your campaign and have started to evaluate some major strategic approaches to fundraising: one-to-one outreach, mass outreach, and events. But now you need to translate that strategy into a plan of attack. In this article, we’ll walk through how to do exactly that.
To do so, let’s assume that I need to raise $100,000 in the next 30 weeks. Here’s how I would create a plan to achieve that:
One-to-one outreach (aka call time)
One-to-one direct outreach from the candidate to the donor (called “call time” in political lingo) will typically be responsible for raising about 75% of your entire budget. That means this approach needs to yield $75,000. In order to plan correctly, I’ll need to have some sense of how much money I typically raise per hour of call time.
At first, this will largely be a guess. But it shouldn’t stay a guess for long. In fact, as soon as you start making calls to potential donors, you should be sure to track your performance closely so that you can very quickly determine the average amount you are able to raise per hour of outreach.
To start, I’ll assume that the campaign can raise $250 per hour spent on call time outreach. That leaves me with this simple math:
$75,000 divided by $250 per hour = 300 total hours of call time needed
300 hours divided by 30 weeks = 10 hours per week of call time needed
You can and should regularly update these plans to reflect how much you are actually raising per hour of call time, on average. If you find that you are outperforming your initial estimates, you can shave off some hours of call time from your schedule that week. If you’re underperforming, you’ll need to add hours to the schedule or otherwise improve fundraising elsewhere in your strategic approach.
Mass Outreach
There are many different fundraising channels that make up this bucket, but the most typical successful approach to mass outreach fundraising follows this process:
First, you must acquire a large universe of prospective donors. This requires an upfront and ongoing investment, either to run digital ads pushing people to give you their email address, or to pay a data provider for a list of emails.
Next, you’ll move these people through a sequence of blast emails, with the ultimate goal of converting some of these individuals from passive recipients of your emails, to contributing donor to your campaign. In addition to emails, you’ll likely continue to pay for digital ads to target these individuals, soliciting contributions.
Of course, the universe of people I pay to advertise to will be much larger than the group that provides me with their email addresses, and an even smaller number will ultimately contribute. So, in order to avoid losing money on this approach, we must raise more money from the few that make it all the way through the process than we spend to get people into and through the process.
So, let’s say I spend $1,000 on digital ads that ask people to sign a petition about a cause closely connected to my campaign. From those ads I collect 100 new email addresses and put them into my mass email outreach program. Over the course of the next few months, we’ll suppose 10 of them donate. In order to break even, the average donation from those 10 individuals must be $100.
As with my call time data, we need to track the performance of this stragegy very closely — if we see that it is over performing expectations, we should pour more resources into it; if not we should consider redirecting our efforts even further to an alternative strategy.
Fundraising Events
If executed well, events can produce strong fundraising results — but if they aren’t planned thoughtfully, they can also create a lot of hassle without sufficient reward.
Fundraising events can consume a lot of time to produce effectively, and they can also cost a lot of money. In order to make this a successful part of your plan, you’ll need to find ways to drive down both of those costs to the campaign. That’s why it’s helpful to create templates and streamlined processes for every stage of your event , so you’re not recreating the wheel each time. Events are also the opportunity to leverage your supporters in fundraising, by enlisting them as hosts and co-hosts and giving them the resources and support they need to tap into their networks to expand your reach for invites. If hosts can also defray or cover event expenses, even better.
You can read a lot more about building a strong fundraising events strategy here.
If we anticipate raising 15% of my budget from fundraising events, in our example campaign I would need to raise $15,000 from this approach. It’s really important to assign each event a fundraising goal (and to make that goal known to all hosts/co-hosts involved). But early on (before you’ve actually scheduled anything), you should gut-check whether you think the amount of events you’ll need to have and the average amount each will need to raise, seems reasonable. Here, I’ll assume we can schedule 15 successful events over the next 30 weeks, which means each should raise about $1,000. That feels accomplishable.
As with all other strategies, however, this one needs to be monitored closely. If one of those early fundraising events costs much more than anticipated, and/or raises far less than budgeted, we’ll need to adjust.
When building your fundraising strategy, it is important to be realistic about what you expect to raise from various channels so that you can plan accordingly. However, that initial plan is just the beginning. Inevitably, things will change. You’ll plan a fundraiser that dramatically outperforms your expectations… and then you’ll have to cancel another one entirely. You’ll have a streak of really great calls…and then go three days without reaching anyone. You’ll run an ad that produces tons of new email signups…and then… you get the idea. If you’re properly tracking your performance, you’ll be able to adjust to these natural fluctuations — and you’ll be able to stay calm during aberrational dips in performance.
So once you have your initial plan it’s time to start fundraising! Check out some other articles on our blog for tips to help you along the way — from the best time to schedule fundraising calls, to building for your donor database.
