Political campaigns must raise extraordinary amounts to be successful. In addition to a good candidate, a great campaign manager, and a well-executed marketing strategy, you also need a well-designed fundraising strategy and activities. Donorbox can help you get noticed and raise funds. Check out our promo video and list of 23 political fundraising ideas to help you get started.
Nowadays, political campaigns need to raise extraordinary amounts of funds to be successful. And this can seem like a daunting task, and can, in fact, discourage candidates from running for office in the first place.
In order to run a competitive political campaign, you need a good candidate, a great campaign manager, a well-executed marketing strategy (that includes a lot of research and an effective media strategy), and most importantly – a solid fundraising strategy.
Donorbox helps you put your campaign on your potential voters’ radar and raise funds with a simple 2-minute donation experience, text-to-give, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer, event ticketing, memberships, and more! Watch this short video to learn more about how Donorbox and its features can be beneficial to your political campaigns.
When it comes to political campaigns, fieldwork is essential. Below we outline the 23 best political fundraising ideas for your political campaign.
Note: Most of these are applicable to all fundraising efforts, from political candidates to non-profit organizations. However, unlike a lot of other fundraising efforts, political fundraising is highly regulated. For example, $3,300 is the maximum allowable contribution under U.S. law.
Crowdfunding is one of the most effective ways to raise money for your political campaign. A crowdfunding page can be set up and running in minutes and can accept donations instantly.
Crowdfunding is an innovative way of raising financing from donors online or even at events. It facilitates the collection of small amounts of money that have been raised by many “ordinary” people.
Your crowdfunding page can and should be branded, including images and videos that tell the story of your campaign. At only a few cents for every dollar you raise, crowdfunding is generally one of the most affordable ways to raise money for your political campaign. Ensure your crowdfunding campaign has social media integrations. This way your political crowdfunding campaign has the greatest chances of success.
Donorbox Crowdfunding lets you quickly create a crowdfunding page that’s equipped with important elements like social media buttons, subscription button for potential donors, a virtual donor wall, an updates tab, a popup donation form, a goal thermometer, and more. People visiting your campaign page can subscribe to receive updates. You can decide which updates you want to send them. All your donors are automatically added to the subscription list and they receive all updates. These features help boost people’s trust in your organization. The virtual donor wall further adds to social proof encouraging more trust and donations.
Here’s an example of a successfully running political campaign page created using Donorbox Crowdfunding.
Grassroots campaigns are essentially about mobilizing people and nurturing and growing a movement all the way from the ‘idea’ stage. It’s hard to find the sweet spot between the mobilization of grassroots and the higher level campaign messaging.
Since grassroots campaigns usually revolve around an idea, make sure to:
While planning your grassroots campaign and recruiting volunteers, ensure they’re also comfortable raising funds for you. This is the simple concept of peer-to-peer fundraising that will help your advocates not just spread the word about your campaign but also raise donations. To start with, choose an online peer-to-peer fundraising tool that helps automate and manage the process.
Donorbox Peer-to-Peer lets you quickly create a peer-to-peer campaign and invite supporters right from the tool. You can also keep the invitation open for all since Donorbox lets you add a button to your campaign that anybody can click to sign up and start fundraising. All donations from all peer campaigns go to your original campaign account, making it convenient for all.
Check out how this organization let anyone sign up to fundraise. All they had to do was enable peer-to-peer on their crowdfunding campaign!
Use Peer-to-Peer for Political Fundraising
Amongst the many fundraising ideas on this list, contribution request letters should definitely be mixed in. Make the letters personal and meaningful and try to have them handwritten, if possible.
It’s not often that we receive handwritten letters anymore, so they can have a big impact. Of course, in most cases, it’s not realistic to handwrite every single letter, so a handwritten letter is reproduced and distributed.
Here’s a sample letter for a political fundraising invitation that was a part of the Biden campaign in 2020. You can see the stress remains on gratitude throughout the letter. And it ends with suggested donation amounts that will help meet the campaign goals. While this letter is addressed to general public, it is advisable that you personalize your letters as much as possible to have the most impact on your supporters.
To take writing letters to a new level, try chain fundraising letters. In a chain fundraising letter, a supporter is sent a letter in which they are asked to send in a donation (whatever average amount your political campaign is working with) and then forward the letter to 10 friends with a personal note asking their friends to send in the same amount and then forward the letter to their friends as well.
Chain fundraising letters are sort of a non-digital approach to crowdfunding or peer-to-peer fundraising. Although they lack the simplicity and speed of digital payments, they are helpful because they help secure donations from those parts of the population that digital campaigns wouldn’t have reached.
To turn this into a digital activity, try using the Facebook tagging functionality. For example, you could have donors tag 10 of their friends and ask them to donate too, visibly asking for their attention. This can help increase the reach of your campaign and help more donations pour in. You can also give donors the link to your online donation page and ask them to add to their posts so that donating to your campaign becomes a breeze for all.
Personal solicitation by telephone is one of the old-time favorite fundraising techniques. Like the chain fundraising letters and handwritten letters, it can also seem old-fashioned. It’s also time-consuming and labor-intensive for staff. You’d also want to prepare fundraising scripts before you ask staff and volunteers to start making calls to potential donors.
Some donors still prefer this type of solicitation, and you might not otherwise reach them using digital marketing. You can instruct them to donate on the website or get the donor to commit to a specific date for collection and stick to it.
Within 24 hours of the phone call, send the donor a letter of thanks confirming the amount pledged, and include a pre-addressed return envelope.
Check out our guide to hosting a successful phone-a-thon for a free sample script and tips to train your volunteers.
Pro tip: Use the telephone primarily to solicit high prospects/major donors.
Custom t-shirts are a great product to help raise funds for your political campaign. They give supporters something in exchange for their donation, and they help promote the cause to a wider audience. Create several different types of design, all brand-aligned to the rest of your campaign, and then find a company/provider to manufacture and ship them.
There are numerous companies that provide this service. Many have a design tool that allows you to create a custom tee or offer pre-built templates to help you get started.
Create a campaign to promote your t-shirts. Sell them at fundraisers, parades, but most importantly – online. Design a social media campaign, focusing on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Consider investing in Facebook or Instagram ads to promote the t-shirts. Here’s an example of an online fundraising campaign that sends out t-shirts in exchange for donations. This helps them raise funds while also promoting the campaign through branded t-shirts.
Raise Money Online with Donorbox
Mentorship auctions are a great political campaign fundraising idea. It gives your donors something of great value, so it’s likely to incite higher bidders.
Look through your donors/supporters database and identify high-profile individuals. Mobilize your personal network, as well as the networks of your staff members. Contact those individuals and ask them to donate their time to your campaign.
Set up bidding for one-on-one chat sessions with thought leaders or participating celebrities. The highest bidder gets the mentoring session(s). The conversations can happen face-to-face or remotely, through Zoom.
Promoting the mentorship auction widely is essential to its success.
Invest in a text-to-give software to capitalize on text donations. You must set up the communication channel on your end by choosing a text-to-give software provider, setting up your campaign’s keyword, and promoting your text-to-give campaign.
For the donor, the process generally goes like this:
It’s essential to have a mobile-friendly donation page and an effective keyword (e.g. “GIVE”). There are a lot of rules and regulations that a campaign manager has to think about before starting a text-to-give campaign, so make sure you’re aware of them.
Donorbox Text-to-Give makes adding this to your campaign a breeze. You can choose from our two available text-to-give plans and activate the feature from your Donorbox account. Once you share the texting number and campaign ID with your donors, the rest of the process is pretty much the same. They’ll receive a link to your online donation page and complete the donation. Donorbox also makes repeating donations very easy. Your donors need to just send in a keyword and confirm wanting to repeat their donation. That’s all – no need to return to the donation page link! Here’s how it looks –
Door-to-door campaigning is daunting and uncomfortable for many people. Which is why very few people actually do it.
However, relationship building is the single most important thing in any fundraising effort. As much as possible, engage in is a personal greeting and invite voters to ask questions. There is no replacement for the opportunity for the voter shake your hand or look into your eyes.
Schedule regular door knocking hours into your schedule and take it seriously. Make sure to leave something around to remind the voters of you, even long after the visit (e.g. a pen or a fridge magnet). The voters will appreciate the personal attention and the accessibility.
Donorbox Live™ Kiosk is the perfect tool to help you collect donations as you go door to door. This app helps turn any iPad or Android tablet into a donation magnet with the help of a paired card reader. Donors can pay with card, smartphone, or smartwatch. Checkout is quick, easy, and secure – plus, your volunteers won’t have to risk walking around with cash. All they need is a stable internet connection, which can be provided by their phone’s hotspot.
The most important time for a political campaign to impress is at the end of it, right before the vote (but with enough time to use the donations). Organize a parade through your neighborhood with a candidate float decorated with signs and balloons. Distribute candidate’s t-shirts and have all volunteers wear them.
Decorate with signs and balloons, and play fun music through a sound system.
Mobilize crews of volunteers to work their way through the neighborhoods with flyers for the voters. Make sure you check the local legal regulation before you act on anything.
This is an effective fundraising idea because it utilizes the sentiment of urgency and can, therefore, bring in many donations.
The campaign brochure, explaining why the candidate should be elected, is the most basic medium used in political campaigns. However, although brochures are easy to produce and distribute, they are typically more informational than persuasive.
Many voters receive your brochure and throw it away soon after. Instead of giving out brochures, consider handing out “brochure notepads”. Unlike brochures, notepads can be used over and over again.
You could even print the pictures and information about the candidate onto the first two pages of the notepad and in this way leave behind important campaign information.
Add a QR code to your notepad to quickly connect voters with your website and donation form! A free QR code is automatically generated with every Donorbox campaign, and you can edit the corresponding link to fit whatever your goals are.
Pro tip: Add a “Vote for XY” or at the top or bottom of every notepad page as a reminder to vote.
Small donors can contribute repeatedly, providing a financial consistency that’s priceless in a years-long campaign.
For example, many Obama donors who gave more than $200 did so over the course of months rather than all at once.
Another reason why small donors are invaluable to a political campaign is that the more people who give you money, the broader and deeper your support in the community. Every person who donates to your political campaign is very likely to vote for you at the polls and tell their friends and family to do the same.
We also already know recurring donations reign supreme in the world of nonprofit fundraising. The same is increasingly true with political campaigns. Instead of asking a supporter to make a $500 donation, ask them to make a $1,000 donation spread out for the whole year and bill them monthly.
Donorbox Recurring Donations helps you create customized recurring donation forms that can either be used with the Donorbox-hosted campaign page or embedded in your website by simply copying and pasting the code. Creating these forms are very simple – you need no coding knowledge at all! Here’s an example of a recurring donation form and fundraising page hosted on Donorbox for a political campaign. As you can see, it has many donation tiers added to the form to make it easy for all levels of donors.
Start a Recurring Donation Campaign
Although “small donor fundraising” is incredibly important, major donor fundraising still plays an important role in reaching your campaign fundraising goals.
A balance needs to be found between pursuing $20 contributions and pursuing large contributions.
Of course, major donor fundraising only works when you establish your own credibility by receiving endorsements from key political leaders or interest groups or by establishing your name and reputation in your community.
It’s important to identify those individuals in the community that make large political contributions, and then contact them – personally if you can. You can do this by researching campaign disclosure records or asking the local elected officials and party leaders.
Although yard signs might seem old-fashioned, they can still be an effective political fundraising ideas, especially if your political campaign is local.
Purchase enough signs to cover major entrances and important intersections in town, and the yards of influencers (see Idea 22) and leaders in your community. As you’re putting up signs, keep a digital map so that it’s easy to see the gaps and also take down the signs after the campaign has ended.
If possible and relevant, put some of them up yourself to show that you are actively campaigning.
This is one of the most affordable political campaign fundraising ideas out there. Email marketing platforms are increasingly easy to use since email service providers have made them simple and intuitive.
With email marketing, it’s essential to grow and nurture your list. You want to grow your list organically by collecting contacts that give you permission to email them. To collect email addresses, add a sign-up form and a subscribe button to the main page of your website.
While it’s easy to focus on the list size, it’s the list quality that really matters. Work on having genuine supporters on your list. Segment your list and don’t send the same email to everyone.
You can used Donorbox’s donor management tools to better segment your audience. Filter your supporters by donation size, frequency, and more to get the ideal list for your message.
Use subject lines that work for your readers, and consider pop-up opt-in forms. Measure the success of your email marketing by gathering data like open rates, click through rates, volunteer sign up, or donation rates. Try to send more emails similar to the successful ones. Whenever possible, A/B test different variations of the same email.
Content integration can be key, with online video and social media outreach, in particular, serving as a powerful adjunct to email fundraising.
One of the most important aspects of modern giving, mobile fundraising involves donors supporting your political fundraising via their smartphones.
This can be through text-to-give, QR codes, and more, but an important element to add to make mobile giving as easy as possible is the ability to check out using digital wallets.
Donors are now accustomed to using Apple Pay, Venmo, PayPal, and Google pay to make payments. If you want to grab their attention, include these options on your donation form. Donorbox UltraSwift™ Pay offers digital wallet options as well as credit card, bank transfer, and direct debit to make giving a breeze for your donors. The giving process is also made four times quicker by eliminating the need for donors to input their contact and payment information. This means your donor drop-off rates are reduced as well.
There are lots of paid advertising options available out there: newspaper, print, digital, radio, television, social media, and more. When considering paid media, be mindful of the cost per thousand impressions (CPM). That’s a measure of how many dollars it takes to reach 1,000 people. Test various channels and choose the one with the best price/performance ratio.
In addition to paid advertising, there is also free media coverage. Free media coverage is typically referred to as “earned media” and frequently comes in the form of news stories in television, radio, and/or newspapers. There are many ways to acquire earned media, from Trump’s controversial statements which generated a lot of earned media for his campaign to reaching out to talking to a local radio station or writing letters to news editors.
A pledge campaign, simply put, is asking people to commit to giving to your campaign at some point in the future or on a regular basis. It allows donors to commit to you without having to donate instantly.
People are often likely to give more if they can defer their payment to the future or pay in installments.
Pledges can also help your campaign plan and forecast better by knowing how much funding you will have access to.
Don’t be afraid to ask for due pledges, always thank your donors, and organize a tracking system for pledges.
Whatever your most successful fundraising technique is, you shouldn’t ignore social media. This is a great way to build your grassroots campaign by getting more individuals to suport your platform. Post short-form video, memes, interactive content, and user-generated content that connects donors with your campaign’s donation form.
Although posting might be easy, converting the follower into a donor isn’t always the easiest task.
Look for moments when supporters are particularly excited (or particularly angry at your opponent) and give them something to do about it — like give you money. Read more about how to turn social media followers into donors here.
A “bundler” (a “connector”) is someone who has the ability to raise a significant amount from their own network, friends, and colleagues. Bundlers are especially important in places where donations are limited by legal caps.
Utilizing bundlers is different than peer-to-peer fundraising since bundlers are more connected than an average person. Bundlers are usually well-known in the political universe. These individuals generally require minimum support from your campaign, perhaps only the candidates signing some cards or showing up at one event.
Mobilizing dozens of bundlers (or hundreds if your campaign is of a larger scope) can significantly increase the number of donations for your political campaign.
A fundraising event is a gathering of donors for which there is a pre-advertised price of admission. Events are an excellent opportunity to attract a particular group of donors to support your campaign at a given place and time. Fundraisers vary greatly in size, price, time of the day, venue, and form — from a large formal event at a hotel, to a reception, to a house party, to a lunch meeting.
Although events can be used to solicit all levels of donors, they are best used to solicit medium donors.
Make sure you have a host committee, an event budget, and a massive focus on marketing the event, especially during a couple of days leading up to the event. Your event ticket pricing strategy decides how much you can raise with your fundraising event. Do not solely rely on donations to be made at the event. Add some activities, food, and drinks to spice up your event and sell tickets to raise money.
Donorbox Events allows you to create online event pages and ticketing forms. You can add images and videos to these event pages. Your ticketing forms can have unlimited ticket tiers as per your pricing strategy. You can also determine and highlight the tax-deductibility of event tickets based on the fair-market value and the tax rate. This helps increase transparency of your events. Your attendees can also make donations from the event page.
Finally, if you want, you can embed the Donorbox event ticketing form in your website as well. Check out this meet and greet fundraising event ticketing form created for a political campaign.
Create a Fundraising Event Page
“A-thons” of all kinds have been very popular with organizations big and small. They’ve proven to be effective for nonprofits, so why not try using them for your political campaign?
Walk-a-thons are essentially peer-to-peer fundraising events. They offer great opportunities for raising money and spreading the word about your organization, without high overhead costs.
It’s not uncommon for only 50 cents of every dollar to reach your campaign after all the logistics and marketing costs are taken into consideration. Of course, no two events are alike and you can get a lot more bang for your buck with add-ons like a raffle or auction.
Many candidates may have celebrity friends and acquaintances willing to provide endorsements and talk about why they support their political platform. While getting celebrities to endorse your campaign is a great fundraising idea in itself, the way to take it up a notch is to ask those celebrities to donate something tangible for a fundraising auction.
You could ask them to donate items like autographed baseballs or basketballs, tickets to an upcoming concert, or a chance to meet the celebrity. Depending on the industry your celebrity is in, the donated item/experience can vary. A fundraising auction has great potential to bring in a lot of donations by people making bids on “one-of-a-kind” items.
Fundraising auctions also provide value to donors, as donors aren’t just making a financial donation, but getting something in return as well.
Due to the high cost of running a political campaign nowadays, you will spend a good portion of your time asking people for money.
We hope the political fundraising ideas outlined above will help you reach your financial goals. Whatever position you’re running for, it will require asking friends, family, and your supporters for donations. It also requires working on multiple fronts – from mobilizing volunteers, posting on social media, to having meetings with celebrities and organizing high-profile fundraisers. All of this can be overwhelming – especially if you don’t have the right tools for the job.
Donorbox can help you raise more money for your political campaign with powerful fundraising tools and features. From attractive, mobile-friendly donation forms, to peer-to-peer and crowdfunding functionality, to on-site giving with the Donorbox Live™ Kiosk app, and more, Donorbox is your one-stop-shop for taking your campaign to the next level.
Sign up to get started now!
Ilma Ibrisevic is a content creator and nonprofit writer. She’s passionate about meaningful work, sustainability, and social movements. If she’s not working, she’s obsessing over coffee or cooking. You can connect with her on Linkedin.
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Ilma Ibrisevic