(8 Best Tools) Software for Political Campaigns
Choosing the right software for your campaign from the start is important.
You want a platform that works well, so you don’t have to change technologies halfway through your campaign.
In this post, we’ll look at the 8 best tools you should look for in a software for political campaigns.
Click here to start your free political campaign software trial today.
Fundraising Software for Political Campaigns
With all the campaign softwares on the market today, the most advanced ones focus on fundraising.
Requiring a high-level of data security, combining multiple technologies for contacting donors and capturing contributions, and should be easy enough for all your staff to use.
Here are the 8 things your political campaign software should do:
- Track your calls
- Manage contacts
- Text contacts
- Email donors
- Custom submission forms
- Provide advanced reporting
- Accept donations
- Generate compliance reports
Some platforms will have fewer features and others will have more, but these 8 tools are crucial to your campaign’s success.
Let’s look at each of these tools in more detail.
1. Track your calls
If you’ve run any sort of campaign, you’ll know how difficult it can be to effectively track calls.
Instead of asking staff to track their call activity manually and risking incorrect or lost information, your political campaign software should do this all for you:
- Automating call time
- Keep up-to-date notes on calls
- Create follow-up tasks
- Send emails after a completed call
Tracking calls will help you better understand exactly how much time staff is spending on the phones while making their lives easier by centralizing all important information.
2. Manage contacts
The purpose of using well-equipped software for political campaigns is to keep things organized, especially as your contact list grows.
It’s not uncommon to have lists as long as tens or even hundreds of thousands of people.
Storing all contact information in one centralized location makes tracking donors and pledges far easier.
It also helps when you’re speaking to contacts via email or on the phone because you can keep additional notes about the person to inform future points of contact.
With call tracking, your contacts list becomes a rich source of donor data to tap into.
Using custom submission forms, you can populate contacts with whatever information you find useful when generating reports.
Turning your contacts list into a priceless source of data and helping you make important campaign decisions.
3. Text donors
Text messages have the highest open rate of any form of communication, with an open rate of about 99%.
This is because recipients typically need to open a text to remove the notification from their screen, unlike an email that might get trapped in a spam folder or drowned out in an inbox.
Your campaign software should have a feature allowing you to text recipients directly from the platform itself.
Text messaging donors is great for reminders, encouraging donors to give again, letting them know about local events, and much more.
On average, 97% of text messages are opened within 15 minutes of being received. Making them great for getting urgent messages out to your members if necessary.
The embedded texting tool should also let you broadcast a message to your contacts all at once.
4. Email donors
Email is still one of the most effective ways of removing barriers to communicating with voters, donors, and volunteers.
It’s an extremely scalable and cost-effective form of communication.
Unlike social media accounts vulnerable to hackers, algorithm changes, and changing platform policies – a growing email list of contacts is your most valuable asset.
No one can throttle your reach or cut you off from your email list.
You’ll use email to send donation request letters, thank you letters, campaign updates, and more.
Combined with the ability to manage contacts and track calls, emailing donors is another core function you should expect to see in most good political campaign software.
Advanced platforms will offer a drag-and-drop email builder to help you create the best-looking emails for your campaign.
5. Custom submission forms
Gathering information from donors and volunteers is vital and should be easy.
The best campaign platforms allow you to create custom submission forms with your own styling to suit your needs.
Like the email builder, your campaign software should give you an easy drag-and-drop form builder for data capturing.
More advanced form builders allow you to create forms using conditional logic fields.
Meaning, that you can create custom questions and responses based on input from the user. A very flexible and powerful tool for any political campaign.
Not only can you use this data to stay in touch with contacts, but advanced reporting lets you turn an almost infinite range of data into useful campaign insights.
6. Provide advanced reporting
The secret to your success is understanding the thousands of data points gathered throughout your campaign.
More importantly, being able to extract and use data based on your own specific requirements.
The most advanced reporting tools will let you filter and organize data by demographics, contributions, and contact history.
For example, if you’re hosting a local event, you can extract data for people based in a specific area who recently contributed to your campaign.
Your data becomes infinitely more useful when you arrange and present your reports in a way that informs your campaign strategy.
7. Accept donations
Only the best campaign software will offer a feature for accepting donations.
Rather than requesting donations using unreliable or expensive bank transfers, making administration a nightmare – you can use a built-in payment gateway letting you instantly process contributions, track donors, and produce detailed reports.
You can also create custom contribution forms with preset or flexible payment options so donors can decide how much they want to give.
These forms are hosted at your own branded domain, so you can link to them from your website, and send them to donors using email, or via text message.
They make receiving donations easy, so you don’t have to worry about bank transfers which are notoriously costly and take ages to complete.
8. Generate compliance reports
When fundraising for a political campaign, it’s important to have all your compliance reports in order to stay on the right side of state and federal finance laws.
Campaign finance reporting can be tricky and takes up a lot of your time.
The great thing about using a political campaign software that handles payments for you is it can quickly generate these compliance reports for you, saving you loads of time and unnecessary headaches.
This is easily done by entering campaign contributions online and using custom algorithms to match donors.
Ensuring you’re compliant both federally and across multiple states, avoiding any reporting or compliance issues.
Conclusion
There are many softwares for political parties, but the kind every campaign needs is a fundraising platform.
Without a proper fundraising strategy and technology to support it, your party is going to struggle to stay afloat.
Over at Campaign Deputy, we understand what it takes to run a successful political campaign.
We’ve created tools specifically for people like you who need help finding donors and getting them to contribute to your cause.
Click here to start your free political campaign software trial today.
