3 Data-Driven Tips to Improve Your Creative
December 2023 | by Jacob Klingensmith
Marketing Strategy
The political fundraising landscape is set to be revolutionized in 2024, with conduit fundraising via the WinRed platform emerging as the game-changer.
What is conduit fundraising? It’s when a political committee receives earmarked donations to a candidate or candidate committee, and then passes them directly on to the intended recipient, thus acting as a conduit. And thanks to digital fundraising platforms like WinRed, this process is more seamless than ever.
This innovative approach allows outside groups supporting a candidate to harness the power of advertising and other methods to generate new donations and attract fresh donors to their preferred candidate committee.
Within the online GOP ecosystem, there are approximately 7 million known donors. However, in the last election cycle, a staggering 74 million people voted for GOP candidates.
The secret to conduit fundraising’s potential success lies not in squeezing more out of the existing 7 million, but in discovering how to reach and convert the 74 million into active donors.
The most effective strategy for conduits focuses on identifying potential donors who exist outside the standard Republican donor ecosystem.
A paradigm shift in fundraising tactics is essential: avoid known donors and even suppress those who have given in past years. Instead, the focus should pivot towards low-barrier-to-entry conversion of modeled donors and high-propensity GOP voters who don’t have a history of giving.
Conventional methods like list rentals are losing their charm. Instead, organizations should invest in advertising, appending quality cell data to donor models, and leveraging peer-to-peer texting to solicit donations from these new potential donors.
To increase accessibility and incentivize new donors, organizations should consider offering as low a donation threshold as possible.
Innovative tactics can include offering merchandise at minimal costs or even just shipping and handling fees. While appearing as a simple transaction, this strategy is a powerful conduit for donations.
Conduit fundraising can be supercharged by incorporating cell phone and email harvesting strategies into door-to-door campaign activities. This isn’t a new idea – groups like Greenpeace and the Human Rights Campaign have successfully utilized these methods for decades.
By gathering contact information directly from potential donors, conduit fundraising operations can establish a direct line of communication and foster relationships with potential donors.
As 2024 approaches, conduit fundraising stands to change the way we conduct political fundraising. The opportunity to tap into a largely untouched donor base, combined with the power of new technology platforms like WinRed, will pave the way for a new era of political fundraising.
It’s about shifting focus from the usual suspects to the untapped potential, finding novel ways to encourage donations, and harnessing the power of data to build stronger relationships with donors.
In 2024, conduit fundraising is set to be the killer app in the world of political campaign financing.
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