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You open your inbox and see two emails asking for money. One is from
an elected official running for office this year. She’s asking for money.
Her email is beautifully formatted and contains slick images, just like
the ten similar emails you’ve received from her this month.
The other email is from your good friend, encouraging you to contribute to a candidate running in a
different race. The email is short and not entirely grammatically correct, but your friend gives
personal reasons for supporting the candidate and includes a link where you can easily add your
money to theirs.
A campaign’s fundraising program often consumes staff time and burns relationships with supporters.
But it doesn’t have to.
Want to spend less time fundraising and bring in more contributions? It’s easier than you think.
NationBuilder's Fundraising Coordination Model saves you time by helping you find potential donors
and build relationships with the ones you already have. We’re excited to make this program available
to you for free, below.
“The NationBuilder way to fundraise takes less time, brings in more money, has the added benefit of not being annoying, and encourages your community to
fundraise for you.”
— Campaign specialist Brad Marsten
Three principles of a successful political fundraising program
GUIDE
1. Fundraising is about relationships
Fundraising isn’t just about raising gobs of cash today. It’s not even just about raising money between
now and election day. Fundraising is not divorced from other campaign efforts, so the same “path of
engagement” that includes donations also includes volunteering, hosting events, and even voting.
A fundraising email that raises $10,000 is good, but a fundraising email that raises $10,000, brings in
10 volunteers, adds 20 people to the email list, gets 15 new suggestions in the campaign suggestion
box, results in 15 recruited donations, primes your entire list to give more next time, and has help from
30 social media ambassadors to amplify the message, is much, much better.
There’s a big difference. If the first scenario is the goal, it’s often considered okay to spam an email
list--in fact, it’s recommended. If the second scenario is the goal then donations are just one of many
actions a supporter can take along a path of engagement. In order to keep track of these actions, you
need to have someone on your team designated to manage each relationship.
Political fundraising
OLD WAY NEW WAY
Buy a list, spam a list Create a list, cultivate a community
Strip mine your list – election day is coming Build relationships – election day is not the end
A numbers game A relationship game
Top down Peer-to-peer
In order to build a meaningful fundraising organization, make sure that someone is in charge of
managing the relationship with each donor. You can set this up in the NationBuilder system by
assigning your fundraising coordinator as “point person” for each donor or prospective donor. You
can set this up in the donation page settings.
2. Peer-to-peer relationships are strongest
The most important reason to not burn your relationship with potential donors is not always clearly
visible. It’s not enough for people to know and trust a candidate: researchers at George Washington
University have found that fundraising requests from peers increase the number of new donations to
a campaign at a statistically significant rate. This is not surprising, since we know that people trust
their peers far more than they trust established organizations. Engaging people to reach out on your
behalf to their peers, then, is all but required in order to retain donors (who are incredibly difficult to
reclaim once lost) and build lasting relationships with people.
Building a good peer-to-peer fundraising pipeline requires trusting people to speak on behalf of your
cause and rewarding them when they do. Because this method relies on targeted relationships, the
potential payoff is significantly higher than a traditional top-down fundraising strategy.
These tags will come in handy later, as you can target an email blast at everyone in your database
who has a particular tag. It will also help you identify top supporters to build personal fundraising
pages and jumpstart your peer-to-peer campaign.
Actions can then be recorded and stored in a
searchable record. You can manage these records this
by marking the donor’s profile with a “tag” based on
relevant elements, such as relationship origin, “big-
dollar” vs “small-dollar” status, or willingness to host a
fundraiser. Perhaps more importantly, though, is that
you’ll be able to tag people based on what actions
they’ve taken in support of your campaign, allowing
you to know what action they should be prompted to
take next. Many fundraising campaigns, for example,
have found that asking contributors to give money
again within two months helps long term contributor
retention, maintaining a positive relationships while
also magnifying impact.
3. Fundraising is based on leadership
The key to setting yourself up for success is to build your donation page and pipeline in such a way
that none of your donors fall through the cracks. This requires giving your fundraising director the
tools to lead the growing community of fundraisers, potential donors, and donors.
One way to do this is to set up reminders for your fundraising coordinator. For example, you might
want to remind your coordinator to send a thank you email (or text!) to everyone who fills out the
volunteer form. We call those reminders “followups” and here’s how you can set them up on
volunteer pages. This type of reminder is invaluable in making sure that staffers keep in timely
contact with donors.
www.nationbuilder.com
LEARN MORE SEE A DEMO START A TRIALnationbuilder.com/features nationbuilder.com/workshops nationbuilder.com
Because NationBuilder tracks engagement history, you’re able to
identify potential donors, give them tools to recruit additional donors,
and move people along a path of engagement.