(If you haven’t already, read the Fundraising Introduction Here)
1. A Basic Budget - Just like anything, unless you have plan in place its often difficult to know how to proceed. A contractor wouldn’t build a new school without the architectural drawings to serve as a guide, so why would you “build” a fundraising operation without a basic budget.
- Sit down with your campaign staff (even if its just your spouse or a close friend) and figure out how many votes you will need to win and how you will ask for that number of votes
- Once you’ve determined the vote number, do some research on the most effective ways to ask for people’s votes in your area. (ex: websites, direct mail, phone calling, canvassing, radio, tv etc.)
- After you’ve determined the number of votes you need and the most effective methods needed to communicate with your potential voters, get hard quotes on how much everything will cost. (Remember this rule, It doesn’t exist unless it is written down.)
- Take all your quotes and assorted figures and put those together in a campaign budget. This budget should detail all the expenses for the campaign in a month to month fashion (or week to week depending on the size and length of the election cycle). So anytime you look at it you’ll know exactly where your money is going. Its easier to spend money when you know exactly where it is going.
2. A Fundraising Plan - After you’ve determined a basic campaign budget, its time to determine exactly where that amount of money is going to come from. How much of it are you the candidate going to contribute, who are you going to ask for donations and how quickly will those donations come in.
- Get back together with your campaign staff and discuss what the most effective methods for raising money are going to be. Every candidate is different so there isn’t a right or wrong answer on where money might come from. Keep in mind your friends and family members (yes you need to ask them to support your efforts), business associates, professional associations, community groups, religious institutions. There are literally thousands of ways to raise money. Creative thinking is a great way to get people interested in contributing. If your campaign can afford it, this would be a great place to hire/use a fundraising firm, they can often help you get started and organized.
- After you’ve put together a list of where the money is going to come from. Figure out exactly how much will come from each group. For example…
- Friends/Family - $5,000
- Work Associations - $2,000
- Chamber of Commerce - $3,500
- Rotary Club - $3,500
- Church - $750
- Country Club Men’s Group - $2,000
- Once you’ve got your groups put together and your amounts determined, then its time to start getting the contact information together. You need to try and get phone numbers for each person you are going to target. You are going to call each of these people and ask them for money, so you want to make sure you’ve got a good phone number. If you can make sure you call these people either on their cell or at home. Many times, folks are uncomfortable talking to you about personal matters like supporting your campaign at the office. (We’ll discuss “Call Time” in a later post).
3. A Finance Plan - As shown in the example from my last post, this is the merged budget and fundraising plan. This is the document you will use throughout the rest of the campaign. Anytime a donation is recieved or a bill is paid, the finance plan needs to be updated to reflect the addition or subtraction of capital. As an important note, a finance plan is a “living, breathing document.” That means that goals change, sometimes you will need to raise more money in a month than you originially thought. So you will use the finance plan to make those changes.
Anyone in the campaign who has a say in strategy or fundraising needs to know what the finance plan is and how it operates. So if you are a large campaign (State House, State Senate, Congress etc.) make sure everyone has signed off on the goals. Because regardless of the position of a person on the campaign, everyone works together to make fundraising goals reality.
nbjames posted this
