Does this bring in money or votes? Newsletter 17
Hey everyone, welcome to the first *post-election* edition of “Does This Bring in Money or Votes?” — we’re Patrick Stevenson, the Chief Mobilization Officer, and Heather Reid, the Deputy Chief Mobilization Officer here at the DNC. The last time you heard from us, we were talking about all the infrastructure the DNC mobilization team had been building in prep for 2020 — that was building the plane, and we’ve spent the last 7 months flying it.
Our biggest takeaway from 2020? If you can be strategic with hiring and resources and intentional about building an integrated team, you can pull off almost anything — including unseating an incumbent president in the middle of a pandemic.
Feature:
Last time we talked, we told you about combining the once-siloed programs of digital and direct marketing into one powerhouse mobilization team — a team that was prepping to execute on years of infrastructure building, but also a team that had not existed in a presidential cycle before.
After years of work, we ended this cycle with the biggest mobilization (or digital, or direct marketing) team the DNC has ever seen. By keeping to a few core principles, we were able to build a ruthlessly competent, diverse, nimble, and joyful team that executed some of the most robust programs in the history of the DNC.
A few toplines:
We entered Election Day with a team of 51 brilliant staff — over 3 in 4 identify as women and nearly half identify as people of color.
We have raised over $135MM so far from our grassroots fundraising program in 2020 — nearly quadruple what we raised in 2016.
In the final three months of the 2020 election, the size of our SMS list nearly quadrupled.
In September 2020 we set a new all-time record for DNC monthly sustaining donations with 83,000 donors giving $1.8 million in a single month.
We hired our first-ever in-house digital advertising team, and made an unprecedented eight-figure investment in grassroots donor acquisition — an increase of 785% over the previous four-year period. So far, this investment has paid back well over 300%.
We saw nearly 21 million visitors to IWillVote.com this cycle, including 2.17 million polling place lookups between October 31 and November 3, 2020.
We focused on organic audience growth where it mattered — between July 2019 and November 2020, we grew our Snapchat audience by over 850%.
We overhauled the DNC’s brand and visual identity, including a complete rebuild of democrats.org.
With our partners at BFP, we ran the first-ever influencers program at the DNC, helping build relationships with 500+ creators and distributors with authoritative voting information.
First, hiring. One North Star we used to build these programs is to hire top-notch people who aren’t just great practitioners in their own chosen fields, but who are also intellectually curious and scrappy at the same time.
It also means no ego. We intentionally sought out, recruited, hired, and trained people who our vice president-elect would call “joyful warriors.” We built a team of folks who were ready to do more and learn something new, and who wanted to roll this boulder up a hill together with our friends on the Biden campaign. For us, that included a mix of some best-in-class political operatives, some talented newcomers from other industries (like fashion and film) who wanted to bring their expertise to this mission, and some hungry new organizers, fundraisers, and creatives.
Those guiding principles allow for individuals to broaden their scope of work in ways that are meaningful to them and to the team. That means empowering folks who run our broadcast SMS program to think about how we can not only build historically strong SMS fundraising, but also use this channel to educate voters in battleground states (more to come on that this week!). That means building a marketing team of talented staff who understand direct mail nose-to-tail and are also eager to learn how to run peer-to-peer SMS campaigns and manage GOTV volunteers.
For most of the cycle, these folks fit into three buckets of work:
Next: resources. The other North Star for our work has been being strategic about resources, whether that’s time, money, or staff. Especially during GOTV, we shifted a lot of staff capacity to where it would make the most difference.
During the late-October direct mail lull, we surged capacity from our direct marketing team to manage our TOTV efforts and volunteers.
We moved some of our video team into sourcing folks on social media who were having trouble getting information they needed to vote so we could reach out to them and help.
Once we got through our October fundraising deadline, some of our email team moved over to help get pro-Dem messaging and voter education information into Facebook groups in battleground states.
So that first chart looked a bit like this on Election Day. Obviously this doesn’t account for every human, but is a good representative sample of how everything shook out! ⤵️
One of the most important takeaways: None of this work would have been as robust or effective without an unprecedented level of trust and partnership between the DNC and the Biden campaign. Whether it was grassroots fundraising or digital organizing or anything in between, this work *worked* because it was done hand in hand with our partners on the campaign — what we call “the most ambitious crossover event in history.”
So what else is coming to you from this incredible team? Well, dear reader, over the coming days and weeks, you can expect to hear more about:
Continuing to land in historically high numbers of inboxes while also bringing inactive supporters back onto our email list.
Breaking all sorts of new ground on IWillVote.com and with digital organizing.
How to expand voter education in a pandemic: using broadcast SMS, Facebook groups, and a brand-new influencer program to help deliver credible voting info to the people who need it.
Results from our first cycle with an in-house ads program.
And lots more. So keep an eye on your inboxes and look out for some tweets.
Job opportunities:
Let’s flip the script today! At both the DNC and Biden for President, there’s a whole mess of wildly talented, creative, professionals who are looking for what’s next. Hire them!
🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵
A lookback and some wisdom from the GOAT, Caitlin Mitchell:
Closing:
Thanks to each and every one of you who came along with us on this ride. Whether you donated, volunteered your time, helped a first-time voter in your life get to the polls, or just read along with us, you helped make this happen.
We are so excited to get to work with a Democrat back in the White House — right after a nap. Keep an eye on this space for lots more to come.
- Patrick and Heather