Friends and Family

People give for many reasons, belief in a cause, a desire to change the status quo, but the primary reason they give is because of you. Take a look at your friends and family. Grab your phone. Look through each contact. Identify an Ask To Give or an Ask To Raise for each. An Ask To Give will be determined by your personal relationship with that person and what they can afford to contribute to your campaign. A family member in college may only be able to give $20 while a friend who is a partner at a law firm may be able to give the maximum amount to your campaign. Having a plan for each ask will drastically increase your fundraising numbers.

Ask To Raise

An Ask To Raise is how you leverage your personal network to raise more. Using your network, ask your friends and family if they can host an event at their place and bring their friends you may not know. Ten people who give $500 may each know five other people who can give $500, bringing your potential Ask To Raise to $25,000.

Call Time

Call Time is one of the most effective ways to fundraise for a campaign, and that job falls onto the candidate the most. Shuffling paper around, updating notes, hand written notes on a post-it on a piece of paper is common for campaigns we have seen in the past. With an electronic Call Time Manager, notes are never out of date. Just pull up your call sheet, already sorted by Not Contact to Already Contacted, and start calling. All your notes, recent call history, demographics and Ask to Give and Ask To Raise amounts are on one screen. Record that you left a message, and after 5 voicemails, drop them from your call sheet. Convert their Ask to Give to a Pledge to Give, and set a due date to follow up on. Having the data in one shared location prevents missing out on potential pledges. It is hard to keep that information up to date in an Excel file that is emailed around the office and you do not know if it is the most recent copy or not.

Digital

Email still provides a fundraising opportunity for emails you have already collected. This is great for the under $500 donors, to bring up your campaign. We see that Tuesday has one of the highest open rates on emails. Digital should not take away from a candidates call time. A candidate who spends an hour reading a once-a-week email blast loses out on 25+ calls they could have made to their call list. Call Time is easy to get out of, keep your candidate focused!

Why Unlimited Emails is a bad idea

Unlimited minutes or text messages on your cell phone bill is great, unlimited emails is not. Strive for quality over quantity. The quality and open rate of your email dictates where it lands. An email a day that no one opens will often land you in a Spam folder. This impacts your truly important emails for calls to action and getting out the vote. Gmail decides if your email goes to the Inbox, Promotions tab, or Spam based on engagement(Open/Click). Would you engage with an email sent every 4 hours or one sent twice a week?

Save More

Spending less is the secret to more effective fundraising. If you spend $1000 on software to help you fundraise, you have to ask for $1000 a month just to break even. Using a tool like Campaign Deputy provides you consistent flat rate pricing, no contact storage fees and some of the lowest online credit card processing fees in the industry. Why spend your time fundraising just to pay for your fundraising CRM system?