Blog - Page 4 of 5 - Campaign Deputy

Pennsylvania Approved Campaign Finance Vendor

Campaign Deputy is now an approved Campaign Finance Vendor for Democrat and Progressive Political Campaigns and PACs for the state of Pennsylvania. You can now electronically file your campaign finance reports with the reports Campaign Deputy generates.

Filling reports is similar to our other states as we provide a list of reports for your campaign, the ending period date and the due by date. You also have the option to amend a previous report. Once a report is generated, you can download the report and use that to upload it to Pennsylvania’s Campaign Finance system at PA Campaign Finance Online . You will need a login which the Department of State can provide.

This is in addition to our FEC electronic filling for Federal Campaign and Federal PACs in Pennsylvania. This expands Campaign Deputy to bring affordable donor management and campaign finance solutions to the state of Pennsylvania.

Keeping track of your tasks

We’ve all tried different ways to track tasks: reminders on our phones, calendar reminders, To-Do lists and sticky notes. We did a quick proof-of-concept for task tracking inside Campaign Deputy and we couldn’t stop. We are releasing our task tracking now. In future releases, you will be able to track task completion across your team and visualize what’s outstanding and what has been completed.

Our new Add Task pop-up will let you create a task, assign a due date, link it to a person’s record and assign it to members of your team. Upon assignment they will be notified about the new task. An email reminder will go out the morning of the date you specify. Users will also receive a daily digest email about all of their active tasks.

On your dashboard, you can see your active tasks along with a dedicated Task area for Active, Upcoming, Due Today and Completed tasks.

We have much more planned for tasks in the future. We already are working on linking Task with Pledges and Call Backs with our Call Time Manager. Stay tuned for March where we are announcing more updates.

Track your Link Clicks

As the campaign trail moves towards November 3rd, digital teams are ramping up their analytics. One request we had was How do you track when something happened with your lists? We looked at how our internal sales team tracks their actions and worked on ways this could apply to a campaign. We found that campaigns could track the conversion but not the pipeline. It’s great to know you just signed up 100 more donors, where did they come from and how many didn’t convert?

We built dpty.us, a new URL Shortner to help track your links. You may have seen these in social media feeds from various tools, but they started to become expensive to enable an API, and then would require each campaign to setup their own account and setup an API key. Yeah, we just lost 90% of our campaigns right there. We wanted this to be integrated into Campaign Deputy, and we need a link tool for our future plans for broadcast texting.

Our Digital Dashboard is where we are migrating most digital tasks to.

We will be enabling our our new Digital Dashboard for campaign starting in July 1st, 2020.

For the techies in the crowd, we knew that the scale on this feature would be huge. We build it using serverless technologies and it’s currently hosted in an Ohio cloud datacenter. If 10,000 people click on a link in the same second, our cloud provider will instantly spin up our code to handle the load and then spin down those servers after the load drops. As the popularity of this grows, we will launch additional regions on the East and West Coast. Currently our average response time is 0.25 seconds with 95% of users seeing a response tie of 0.44 seconds. To most this will be almost invisible for them.

On the road to broadcast texting

While working with our campaigns, we wanted to provide something more than just sending out texts. We wanted to provide a way to automate or donor to the campaign in an automated way. We created a way to rent a Toll Free number or local number, and set up texting keywords or Opt-In flows that use AI to pull the name out of the response given.

Why Toll Free?

Toll Free numbers are a quick and very affordable way to get a number that can send more than 1 text a second. Local Area Code numbers are limited to 1 text per second while Toll Free numbers start at 3 texts a second and can be adjusted to send 25 texts a second. To send 1,000 text using a local area code would take 17 minutes, with a toll-free number it can take between 1 minute and 6 minutes.

What about a short code? Short codes are expensive and requires 8-12 weeks to setup with each carrier.

Short Codes are expensive. Our fee for a short code starts at $1,200 a month with a minimum of a 6 month contract. Most of that fee is paid to the carrier for registration and what they call a Monthly Maintenance Fee. It also takes 8-12 weeks to get approval for a short code. Based on your fundraising cycle, 8-12 weeks may be after your Primary or General election.

Why AI?

When we ran out first internal test, the opt-in flow picked up the wrong responses to “What is your name to confirm your opt-in?”. People would text back “My name is Charlie”, or “Sure, it’s Alex”. We realized that we didn’t want to store someone’s name as the whole response. We processed the response through AI to grab just their name to pick up “Charlie” , “Alex” as the name. This also helps to de-duplicate them in the system and check to see if there is already a record in your database.

Calls Too

Each phone number can be set up to forward a call to another phone. The person who is calling will show up on your caller id but the caller won’t have access to your phone number. With our P2P Texting campaigns, we see a few people who call the number back. We wanted to make sure if someone needed to, they had the option of talking to someone on your team.

Getting Started

Every active account will receive an email starting May 15th with details on how to set up their number. We are including 1 free toll-free number to every account. Make sure to provide feedback to your account manager with any questions, comments, or suggestions while using this new feature.

If you are not an active client, use our Contact Us form to see our latest demo.

April 2020 Updates

Campaigning in 2020 is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Campaigns have been adapting and so havewe.. We have seen a shift in donations, more to come later on that, and an increased use of our P2P Texting to reach voters.

Whats New

With teams meeting virtually, you can now track outbound emails in one of two ways. First, you can add an Activity to a profile to track of communications that aren’t a call. At the moment, we have only turned on Email tracking. We are looking to merge call time into our Activity Tracking soon.

The second way, is a BCC Email. With each email you send, you can include your account’s specific email address in the BCC field and we will tag it to their profile. Saving you the extra step. The BCC email for your campaign will be your campaign’s full name followed by@campaigndeputymail.com. For example, your BCC email for “Alex for Senate” would be alexforsenate@campaigndeputymail.com. Check our our help documentation on how to automatically include this email as a BCC in G-suite, or Outlook.

Example of an incoming BCC email for a campaign

Mobile Texting

When we first launched our P2P texting, most volunteers were in the campaign office working side-by-side the Field Team for GOTV texts. Things quickly changed, so we changed our texting to have a mobile-friendly view.

New Domain Name

When we first launched, most websites ended with .com, .net, .org, or .io. Recent industry changes have allowed multiple new top level domains (TLDs) including .app. We wanted to let our security-minded users know that we also own campaigndeputy.app. It has the distinct advantage in that Chrome, Firefox, and Safari require all connections to be encrypted by default. Most connections only require it after the first connection. If you happen to block 3rd party domains as a privacy measure, please add an exemption for campaigndeputy.app in your browser plugin.

Other Updates

Fixed a padding issue on mobile devices for certain pages to make viewing easier.
Fixed an issue when editing debt payments that are linked to a disbursement.
Per new policies from the FEC, we moved a few compliance notes out of the memo field to the purpose field.
Fixed an issue with calculating Average Call Time on the call time report.
Thank You Note reports export dates to an easier date format.
Email images can be added while editing an email and can be dragged and dropped in the Editor.

Social Media Links

How do images and text show up when you add a link to your Facebook post or Twitter? Each one is different, Facebook has “Open Graph” and Twitter has “Twitter Card Tags”. Both allow you to tweak your message and show a short example of the content before someone clicks into your link.

Your Campaign Website

Your campaign website will be shared via social media channels. You can preview what a share would look like using the links below. If you have recently changed your website, you can use the tools below to refresh Facebook/Twitter’s copy of your website. Each page on your site can display a different image or message, make sure to test them all.

Ask you web designer to add the necessary tags to support Facebook and Twitter. If you are using WordPress, Yoast SEO provides options to choose what you want displayed. Squarespace also supports adding tags to your site.

ActBlue

The ActBlue default tag is “I just gave to Candidate” and displays when you post an ActBlue link on social media. You can update this per each ActBlue contribution form to customize your message and even add your own logo to the link.

Campaign Deputy Forms

Our hosted forms support both Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Cards. You can update the message of a form by going to the Style tab and adding your own custom message to the Social Media Message field. Our forms are used for many different purposes, each form will need to be updated with a Social Media Message. Our embedded form option requires your web designer to select the tags for Facebook to pick them up correctly. Have your web designer contact our support team for more details.

Tech Talk: Performance

Most of our posts have been about fundraising, this will be about how we built Campaign Deputy to be quick to use for campaigns throughout the country. We started with the idea “be better, faster, and don’t crash”. With that, we set out to build a web application that can be fast, even if you happen to be on a 3G connection. Then we apply that same performance to out outbound features, forms, and page analytics.

Over half of our site loads in under 1 second.

We have been using a third party to measure how long it takes to load a page, commonly called RUM, Real User Monitoring. This tracks each time a user loads a page in our application, and records the time, and the time it takes to pull new updates for the page. Overall, more than half of our pages load in under a second. We accomplish this by creating the smallest possible page to load. The average size of a web page is over 3MB, ours is under 1mb down to 1/2mb. If you have ever tried to load a news article on a slow connection the page size matters a lot. After you load our site once, we cache everything and that page load turns into 1/16th of a MB. You likely have a word document larger than that.

Locations throughout the US that can load our forms.

Speed and distance also matter, so we have our code throughout the US that helps to load our forms. This allows our PopUp forms to load as fast as the page loads so you can capture all those new donors who go to your campaign page!

Further plans for 2019

First we are launching a new cloud based load balancer for our applications with more support for IPv6. We have redundant sites and connections to our servers, but they can be slow to react to changes. We also launched a status page so you can see in real-time how our system is doing at
status.campaigndeputy.com so we can be transparent out our system health. Also with our launch of our mobile app, you’ll start to see more API access for integrations from the technically savvy campaigns out there.

Our development team says thanks for reading!

Email Marketing for Campaigns

Political Campaigns ask us “How can we get an open rate higher than 40%?” Segmenting your list, sending to the right audience and sending engaging emails should be part of your long-term strategy. “Batch and blast” emails are no longer effective because email providers will delay, flag and trap senders’ messages and because batched emails are often filtered by users’ smart inboxes.

Personalized Emails to High Engagement Users

Start by segmenting your email lists into two groups: high engagement and low engagement. Send an email to your high engagement lists thanking them for their support before sending it to supporters with lower engagement. Every 90 days, you should further segment your lower engagement list. Remove the email addresses of people who never open your emails. Curating your list will help you achieve a higher open rate.

Email Health

When spam started to become a problem, email providers looked at IP addresses to block spammers and then examined common words/phrases. Now, email providers look at your overall email health based on IP, Domain, and Open Rate. What does a spam email to 5,000 people advertising generic pharmaceuticals and a campaign email to 5,000 disengaged people have in common? They both go to spam. With Machine Learning and A.I. being introduced into Spam Filters, more nuanced details will start to affect email.

How an email provider determines if your email lands in the inbox.

The Good, the Bad, the Bounces

Bounces happen. People get married. They change jobs. The change internet service providers.. What is important, is starting off with the lowest possible bounce rate. AOL and Yahoo shut off email accounts after 12 months of inactivity. It’s important to check your email list if you haven’t sent to it in a while. An active list from 2 years ago may be a mediocre list today. There are several services that will check your list before you even begin your messaging campaign. Target a bounce rate below 2% for the first email.

First Time Candidates

How do you start an email campaign if you’re a first time candidate? It’s easy, start with your friends and family. They are already on your call sheets, send them an email to help them quickly give online. Do not buy an email list. People will want to contribute to your campaign if they know you and your message. An email from a candidate they’ve never heard of is very similar to an email from a Nigerian Prince. Get a voter file, buy digital ads, and create a “Call To Action” to get capture email and contact info organically from voters who want to hear from you. Use Pixels to re-target website visitors with a “Call to Action”. Build surveys and ask for email address.

Nonprofit Email Marketing

Email Marketing for Political Campaign is similar to Nonprofit Email marketing. For more information, check out Wild Apricot’s The Essential Guide to Nonprofit Email Marketing.

Updates Released 2019.05

It is Derby Week here in Louisville, quick update on some of our features releasing for the first part of May. We are already excited for the 2020 election cycle for political campaigns.

Quick Tip

You can add your own message to our Hosted Contribution Forms. After creating the form, go to the edit screen and click “Design Editor”. The contribution form is already a two column layout, and be careful adding too much as on mobile the message will show before the contribution form.

Hosted Contact Forms

We released our new Form Builder, the first question we had was “Can you host this for us?”. Sure! We built out our hosting to match our Branded Contribution Forms. You pick the color, logo, if you need a disclaimer or a “Paid for by” box, or without a border, even the size of the font. You can set a common style for all your hosted forms, then update your forms with their own colors if needed.

We do not have bumper stickers, if you want one, let us know.

Private Lists

You can now create, “tag”, people into a Private List. Great for your Call Time Manager who is building a daily list that no one else needs to see.

Did you know our ? icons give you quick tips for individual fields throughout Campaign Deputy?

General Fixes

Added a new Do Not Send status of “Unknown Opt-In Status”. This helps campaigns that are not sure of their current email list quality to prevent accidentally sending to a large number of bounced emails.
Updated the formatting of Phone Numbers to be more consistent.
Hosting for our Hosted Contribution Forms changed for technical reasons.
Disbursement Itemization is now available for FEC reporting purposes.We are updating to use more of the FEC’s web services now that those are available.

Running for Office in Kentucky

Interested in running for office in Kentucky? Here is a helpful guide to highlight the information you need if you are a first time candidates.

What are you running for?

In Kentucky, State Representatives run every two years. Just like the US House of Representatives. Kentucky State Senators run every four years in staggered terms. Senators from districts with even numbers run during the Midterm elections. Senators with districts that have odd numbers run during Presidential election years. Statewide candidates run in “off” years, the year before a Presidential.

Members of the US House of Representatives are elected every two years. US Senators are elected every six years in staggered elections. Kentucky’s next US Senate Race will be in 2020.

How do I announce that I am running?

For a Kentucky campaign, you would file your Letter of Intent with the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance. They have a helpful guide located here. For local races, City Council, Property Value Administrator, etc, check with your local County Clerk as you may have to notify both agencies. You also should check that you qualify to run as each office has residency requirements.

For Federal races, you can file with the Federal Election Commission and submit Form 1 – Statement of Organization here. The FEC requires that U.S. House races must file electronically.

It is best if you have already registered a domain name before you announce so others do not register a domain name for you. Use a .com domain, and if you want to run again in the future, do not use a date in the domain name. Hard to spell domains are tougher to remember, you may want to register common misspellings as well. If you register you domain with Google Domains, setting up G-Suite Email is easier later on.

I filed my paperwork, what next?

Next, you should start the core components of your campaign.

Build a Website. Hire a local web designer, or use Wix or SquareSpace to build a quick landing page, or a form to ask for Volunteers
Sign up for Email Hosting. Don’t settle for a free email system, you have no support to call if you are locked out of your account.
Setup online fundraising. You can use Campaign Deputy for Online Fundraising, or use ActBlue, or both!
Build your list of Friends and Family and think of what you could comfortably ask them to give to your campaign. This is commonly called an Ask To Give.

What are Disclosure Reports?

In Kentucky, you have to report any contribution over $100 with their First and Last name, Address, Occupation, Employer and date of the contribution. If someone gives twice and exceeds $100 in total, you must report that as well. You could keep track of this in an Excel or Google Doc, you don’t want to when the Kentucky Reports are due 30 days and 15 days before an election when you are out knocking on doors! Campaign Deputy can help generate your reports in one-click, sign up for a free trial today!

Form Editor Updates

We have been busy updating our form editor to match more of what you expect from our other editors, like our email drag and drop editor. We also wanted the form to be easy to use with mappings into common CRM fields. You see we fields ready for Name, Email, Phone, Address. To use a field, just click or drag it over into your form.

We love lists, and you can see that lists play a part in our form Editor too. List are perfect for your Volunteer Sign Up form. Create a list for Yard Signs, and as you deliver the Yard Signs, move them to a “Has Yard Sign” list. No more wondering “Does Yes they want a Yard Sign mean they have it, or not, did someone make a note?”

Keep your forms short and to the point. Using Conditional Logic, you can show questions specific to the answers based on what is entered.

We also included a built in style editor. Customize the background color of your form, or the size of your Form Title. For our political campaigns, or non-profits, that have their own web developer, we have specific CSS elements and label the embedded form with a unique ID to allow you to apply your own CSS to the form without impacting the rest of your site.

Our new Form Editor is launching the week of April 14th. Contact us for a quick demo of our new Form Editor.

Text and Facebook Messenger for a Campaign Team

Campaigns have similar needs to some companies, scaling out their one-to-one communication across a team, and from one common contact point. Here at Campaign Deputy, we have internally been testing a new tool that allows us to provide Live Chat, Facebook Messenger and Text message support from one tool, and we did not have to build this one, just integrate with it. We have been using Rocket.Chat with Twilio for text messaging, and Facebook Messenger for our Facebook page. We looked at a lot of tools, and with prices approaching $20/user/month, we couldn’t find one we liked until we stumbled upon Rocket.Chat. We Self-Host, because we have the server space, you could to while their plans start at $4/user/month, it makes sense for a campaign to let someone else deal with the hosting.

We of course love the built in live chat, we can trigger custom messages per a page, if they spend more than a minute on a page, you can start to send them custom messages. Maybe a voter lands on your healthcare policy page, you could trigger a message to ask if they had any other questions about health care 2 minutes after they open the page.

Text Messaging is built in with Twilio. You can register a local phone number and integrate it into Rocket.Chat. Volunteers come and go, with one central platform you can keep the conversation going from one phone number and assign your team to built in queues, departments and more. If you are on the go, their mobile web app works great. We did have some issues with their Mobile App for Android, they are aware of the bug, so we encourage anyone to use the app in their web browser until that bug is fixed. A small price to pay for a tool that is 75% cheaper than most competitors, or free if you have an IT team. You do have to pay per a text message, and rates are $0.0075 per a text per Twilio’s pricing guide on January 2019.

This was just another tool we were impressed with and could see the potential for a campaign to use in the age where a strong digital strategy is needed for most campaigns.

Facebook support is easy to setup too. You can follow their documentation to setup the system, we had it setup in about 3 business days.