Santiago Stocker

13 Rules of Campaign Finance

Principles of Fundraising for Insurgent Campaigns

9/22/2011

Note: Raising money for political campaigns is a complex endeavor, and there are many different approaches that work. Some work better than others. This is not a comprehensive guide to campaign fundraising, but a white-paper of critical principles intended to give Finance Directors on insurgent campaigns the conceptual keys to success.

1. Establish a clear fundraising goal Determine your goal by calculating what you will need to spend during the course of the campaign. Then take the overall fundraising goal and break it down by specific program areas over time (candidate call-time, online fundraising, mailings, events, PAC contributions, and any other program area that you think will be a major component of your fundraising effort). Establish goals that are ambitious but feasible. 2. Never stop prospecting If youre going to throw everything at it, you should plan on building your lists, adding contact, donor, and biographical information to the prospects in your database, and reaching out to more PACs, VIPs and donors from the grassroots to the big wigs from beginning to end. 3. Ask for help and use your contacts You cant be an expert in every field, and you will need help in some areas more than others. Find a good contact for labor outreach, for PAC fundraising, for VIP outreach, and for connecting to organizations and issue campaigns. 4. Make the right ask Who are you asking? What are you asking for? Each universe of prospects is better suited to one kind of ask than another. Keep this in mind as you go. What a prospect is best capable of doing to help your candidate the most is critical to understand. Is it a simple ask for money? Are you asking them to help you raise money? Are you asking them to host an event? Are you asking them to reach out to their personal friends, their religious community, their business partners or their political colleagues? Making the right ask maximizes the efficiency of your outreach efforts and maximizes potential contributions to your campaign. 5. Never stop asking Political donors and activists understand and respect the way campaigns function. A good campaign is expected to be aggressive, relentless and tireless in its efforts to raise the funds it needs to win. Dont ever be embarrassed, nervous or uncertain about asking for money; its how the campaign world works. The harder you try, the better you will do.

6. Be a team player Who will edit your videos, set up stand-alone fundraising pages, troubleshoot technical problems, double check your work your links, content, format, images, and videos? A good finance effort should reach out to and incorporate all other campaign departments, including Field, Communications. Just like inter-disciplinary academics, to maximize your effectiveness in the real world you need to approach the challenges of finance from every angle. Remember Finance is a numbers game, just like Field. It is also a messaging battle and you cant get your message across to the right people in the right way without the help of Communications. 7. Remember there is an easier way to do everything! Analyze your systems and cut out steps that arent necessary. Your finance shop should run like a well-oiled machine because if you want to be creative, flexible, and have the resources to quickly adapt to changing circumstances, you simply cant afford to get bogged down in day-to-day processes. 8. Engage and respond: never take a donor for granted! A mistake often made by campaigns is to end the donor outreach effort when a contribution has been successfully solicited, and then not engage that particular donor again until you are ready to ask for more money. When you are not asking donors for money, make sure to keep them in the loop. For example, you might want to consider including important donors in a select Facebook group, Google group, or on a separate email or mailing list. Donors should be kept in the loop about important developments during the course of the campaign, about polls, goals that are achieved, and shifts in the direction of campaign strategy or policy. Donors are also great sources for help, advice, ideas and contacts. Last but not least, donors that approach the campaign with a specific proposal or idea about how they can help should never be ignored. Much more than checkbooks, your donors are activists and entrepreneurs with good ideas and the initiative to carry them out. They also have great contacts and the ability and willingness to utilize them. An offer to help host an event, assist with certain aspects of the campaign, or pass along contacts and make connections should never be ignored. 9. Believe in your ask Be confident in your ask. If a prospect senses that you are unsure about what you are asking for and why, it becomes much more difficult to convince them to step up to the plate and join your effort. Good fundraising requires multiple asks of each prospects along with continual, varied and aggressive follow up. Remember, donating to a political campaign is one form of activism, and donors want to make sure that they are investing their resources in something that is worth their time and support. Dont forget that raising money for

political campaigns is hard. Unlike selling a vacuum cleaner or a new brand of toothpaste, successfully recruiting donors to your cause requires that you sell an idea. If you want to sell an idea you must be confident of your ask and confident in your endorsement of the effort and the broader implications of the campaign. You must be clear and convincing to possible donors when you explain why their involvement and financial support is critical to your short term campaign goals as well as the broader goals of the campaign and candidate in general. 10. Match your progress in real time against your goals The success of your finances operation, much like a field effort, can be easily measured. Tracking your outreach efforts and results on a day-to-day basis is critical. One key to a good finance operation is adaptability. There is no point in doing something over and over again despite the fact that each successive time fails to meet expectations. It is important to track your efforts and results from the very beginning of your finance effort. This will allow you to observe the success or failure of different facets of your fundraising strategy and adapt accordingly. Remember, your resources are finite; devoting time to one endeavor will take time away from a potentially more effective activity. Tracking your progress on a day-to-day basis, and then evaluating the effectiveness of your different programs on a weekly or bi-monthly basis allows you to slowly increase the effectiveness of your finance shop by incrementally adjusting the resources, time and focus devoted to each part of your finance plan. The bottom line: Tracking your progress in real time gives you the flexibility to adjust your priorities and resource allocation a little bit at a time. Continually evaluating your progress and the effectiveness of all the individual components of your finance plan gives you the advantage of being able to fine tune your operation over time and steadily increase the effectiveness of your operation. This will also help you avoid the obvious risks that accompany infrequent evaluation and abrupt, drastic changes to the methods and goals of your operation. 11. Follow up, follow up, follow up! Every call or meeting with a prospect should be followed up. The best way to conduct effective follow up with prospects is to decide on your follow up systems at the very beginning of the campaign. Set up your systems so they are easy and efficient to use, vary your means of follow up so that you can increase your overall outreach to specific targets as well as approach them from a wide variety of angels (emails, calls, meetings, letters, faxes, text messages, social networking, etc.) to make sure youre not missing an important means of communication or contact that one donor might prefer over another. 12. Establish systems that are efficient

Before any campaign finance operation is launched, systems for list building, data integrity, call time, results-measuring, letters, calls, emails, follow ups, faxes, event invites, etc. should be laid out clearly and precisely in your finance plan. The technology involved should be tested early on so you can troubleshoot any problems before the campaign is in full swing. The systems you establish will be modified to adapt to changing circumstances as the campaign progresses, but having a clearly established set of procedures right from the beginning means that your finance effort will be more efficient and effective, and that volunteers, interns or new staffers can quickly learn and easily execute a wide variety of critical tasks.

13. Throw everything at it You should be holding events and sending out event invites, making calls, text messaging, sending e-faxes, emails, form letters and hand written notes, using social networking platforms and utilizing third-party outreach, incorporating tailored fundraising pitches, holding luncheons, pursuing issues-based outreach, and making all the community, business, political, religious, ethnic and labor connections that you possibly can. Simply put, you have to throw everything at it. You have to be realistic and effective in your approach, but if you dont utilize every resource at your disposal, you cannot hope to succeed.