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

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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.