The presidential campaign season is now in full swing, and there won’t be any rest for the weary until the election is complete in 2016. This is both an exciting and stressful time for thousands of people working in politics across the country. We know that fundraising is always a hot topic ahead of an election year, so we wanted to shed some light on tools to help your candidate raise more money.
Donor Data and CRMs
Donor data is simple—it’s the historical record of political donors within a given district, and this information is a phenomenal tool. Once you know who a donor has given to, and how much, you can determine whether or not they would be interested in a candidate like your own.
Once you have a strong donor database to start with, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution works to cultivate and manage the relationship you have with each individual by organizing their contact information, donation history, and interactions with your campaign all in one place. A great one for small to mid-size political campaigns is pipe drive. For federal campaigns, we recommend crimson.
Email Marketing
With a good database and the right CRM in place, getting the message out to potential donors becomes the next step in the campaigning process. One of the easiest and most cost effective ways to do this is through mass email communication. With tools like Constant Contact and MailChimp, campaign managers can import the emails from their database or integrate the two, and begin sending well written and personalized messages with clear calls to action to their potential voters and donors. These systems are incredibly easy to learn and use and, in this digital age, absolutely essential to reaching the large audiences necessary for a successful fundraising strategy and campaign.
A Capable Website
Generally speaking, Republican candidates can be a bit slower to adopt digital tools than their left wing adversaries. This isn’t always true, of course, but here at Campaign Now, we still get asked if having a website for your campaign is 100% necessary… And as always, we say yes. Fortunately, through platforms like Wordpress and NationBuilder, it’s easier than ever to build a highly functioning and well-designed website in much less time than it used to. With these tools, you can fairly easily add widgets that make your website serve a stronger purpose than just a brochure. They can enable your website to accept online donations, collect email addresses for potential voters, and basically serve as a hub for those interested in learning more about your campaign and engaging with it.
User Friendly Donation Software
When it comes to generating massive amounts of cash for your campaign, those generally smaller, online donations are not to be scoffed at. According to an article published by ABC News, Hillary Clinton raised “$45 million in donations in just the first three months of her campaign alone” and “91 percent of the donations made…were small dollar donations of $100 or less.” If that doesn’t lead you to believe in the power of online donations, we don’t know what will! Using a system like Rally.org or Anedot will make gathering those digital tokens of support easy for your campaign and your donors, which is operation critical when you’re reaching out to those who may be a little less technically savvy than our nation’s younger generations.
Other Types of Fundraising
If you’ve been keeping up with Campaign Now, you may have noticed our insistence on developing a comprehensive fundraising strategy to ensure you’re not missing any sources of financial support. We’ve talked about why among these more innovative ways to reach donors, there is definitely still a place for more traditional, direct methods such as direct mail, telemarketing, and more. Our services page outlines all of the tools we consider vital to raising more money on all fronts.
We know that gathering all the pieces required to assemble a remarkable campaign to raise more money can seem overwhelming, but with each passing year that technology advances and it costs more to run for office, it enables candidates to build bigger, better campaigns in easier and more innovative ways. Witnessing the fundraising breakthroughs of the 2016 presidential candidates will be thrilling for us at Campaign Now, and we hope that between us and them, you will be inspired to set goals for your candidate higher than you ever thought achievable.
