3 Stages of a Yearlong Fundraising Plan
By: Grant Hallmark
Tags: Campaign Finance, Politics, Fundraising, Political, Campaign

Many campaigns need about one full year of planning, preparing, and fundraising to reach their budget goals and execute their media and voter contact plans. In this article, I’m going to describe how a yearlong fundraising operation can be broken down into three stages: the early money, the uphill money, and the downhill money.

The Early Money

The fundraising consultant and/or the finance director is often the first hire on a campaign — and with good reason. Without the early fundraising operation, the candidate might as well cancel the whole endeavor. There’s no campaign manager, media consultant, field director, or advertisements without cash-on-hand. It all starts with the finance team!

One year out, the primary task of the fundraiser and the candidate is to estimate the raise goal and map out a path to achieving it. Like the math-centric approaches in voter identification and get out the vote operations, fundraising can be quantified by identifying enough mid-level to major donors to reach the money goals.

I use this spreadsheet as a template for mapping out the fundraising. As you can see, it tracks four categories of money over time: call time, events, PACs/unions, and email. There are not clear boundaries between these categories of money. Events will often require call time to lock in hosts, co-hosts, and attendees. Sometimes, the candidate will call a donor and they will pledge a contribution, but then will give through a blast email. The best way to track and record these different sources of money contributed online is to use distinct pages and/or reference codes in your payment processor (ActBlue is the most commonly used processors). Each event should have its own contribution page and every email should have its own reference code. Tracking these contributions will give you the ability to measure performance.

Over the past cycle, I used CallTime.AI for researching, organizing, and tracking progress with donor contact and conversion. Before finding CallTime.AI, I handled all of the early money organization and preparation by hand (researching past contributions, signing up interns to lookup contact and biography information, assigning hard ask amounts based on giving history, then prioritizing donors by potential contribution). Hopefully a party entity or a similar campaign would give me their donor lists, this being the only way to truly speed up the donor research process. Now, I upload lists to CallTime.AI and the research 80% complete within about 10 minutes.

The Early Money will almost always consist of friends, family, and close professional associates. Here is a great article about building your first lists and rolodexing the candidate.

The Uphill Money

The second phase of fundraising will always be more difficult than the first phase because it requires persuasion and cold calls. At this point, you will have exhausted your close contacts and the “low hanging fruit” from your initial list building process. The next group of individuals will include standard political donors who regularly give to Democratic or progressive candidates. In this phase, you will also rely on your core supporters to bundle money from their friends, family, and associates.

The universe of people the candidate is calling will now expand to folks that the candidate may not know, so you might run into some discomfort or resistance from the candidate. Cold calls that are meant to result in $1,000+ contributions are hard! It would be good to keep in mind that these donors view themselves as part of the political process and seasoned political veterans. They have opinions on electoral politics and will most likely be interested in discussing inside baseball with the candidate. This also means they are just savvy enough to be dangerous. Building out a prospectus, polling memos, and a path to victory documents will help the campaign make arguments for itself with these donors. Here are a few examples of these documents:

The campaign needs to project viability and competence during this period of the campaign. Earned press on great campaign finance filings will help reinforce this perception. Nothing convinces donors the campaign can win like a press piece on the impressive amount of money the campaign has raised.

Also, bundling programs can significantly help the campaign reach their goal during this phase of fundraising. Bundlers are people in the donor community that are highly supportive of the candidate and campaign and would like to help above and beyond a max-out check. They can hold fundraisers or simply call and email their associates to raise money for the campaign. Some campaigns will refer to these bundler programs as “finance committees” in which each member of the committee will be responsible for raising some fairly aspirational number. For example, a member of the finance committee for a presidential race might be tasked with raising at least $25,000 by the primary election in the member’s state. This can be scaled down for statewides, congressionals, or local races.

The Downhill Money

The third and final phase of fundraising is much, much easier if the campaign has met its goals (or most of its goals) in the first and second phases. By this time, there has been a cycle of positive press as a result of the campaign finance filings, which in turn causes another round of great fundraising because donors’ confidence in the campaign is building. Fundraisers and media consultants often refer to this as the “virtuous cycle” of great fundraising and positive press. Moving the campaign through this cycle throughout the campaign should be a primary goal of the fundraising team.

It becomes easier (mostly due to organic and email online donations taking up a larger percentage of overall fundraising) but the candidate still needs to make calls. This is a great opportunity for re-solicitation of the donors who gave in the first phase and expansion into donors that were hard to get or were on the fence in the second phase. Ideally, the fundraising operation will have a full head of steam and will be able to brag about the cycle total fundraising. Donors are looking for bets to make at this point in the election. They will want the candidate’s cell phone number and some “facetime” if possible. But mostly, they just want to be with a winning campaign so they can mention it at dinner parties and country club tennis matches.