Does this bring in money or votes? Newsletter 11

Hello and happy June! I am positively THRILLED to introduce myself and kick off this edition of “Does this bring in money or votes?” My name is Olivia Hill and I am the Leadership Circle Donor Manager on the DNC’s Mobilization team. The Leadership Circle is our mid-level donor group who contribute more than $1,000 to the DNC in a calendar year - but more on that later. 

I spend most of my days talking to and thinking about this group of donors and I’ll do my very best to distill what I’ve learned about them to you.

...and reader, I’ve learned a lot. 

Feature: Mid-level donors

As you’ve read many times in this newsletter already, the DNC Mobilization team is home to both digital and direct marketing strategists focused on *mobilizing* the grassroots. That means communicating with our small-dollar donors through every channel at our disposal. 

There’s a key qualifier in that sentence: small-dollar donors. Democrats pride ourselves on the connections we have with the grassroots and our commitment to funding massive operations with the support of small-dollar donors. Most organizations address donors this way. Large dollar & small dollar.

Here’s the problem with that binary. A whole lot of people fall into the gray area between “high-dollar donor and low-dollar donor.” That’s where I come in. 

In October 2019, the DNC Mobilization team created my position to address the need for a more focused and individualized approach to our mid-level donors. We identify this group as roughly anyone who has given $1,000 to $10,000 to the DNC in a single calendar year. These mid-level donors (or our Leadership Circle) make up anywhere from 15-25% of our team’s revenue across channels every month.

These donations typically come in through our email, mail, phone, or digital ads programs, so being integrated with the Mobilization team is very important. Think of this as a hybrid of relationship-driven major gift fundraising with the data-driven targeting of small-dollar fundraising, to give us the best possible touch points to our prospects. 

Why do we need to treat mid-level donors differently than how we treat the majority of grassroots donors?

Because we knew that 2020 would be a historic year for mobilizing donors, our goal has been activating them consistently throughout the year. Historically, this group of donors has been very active in the early months of the year and less active throughout the spring and early summer, and then returning in the fall and right up to the election. 

That pattern of disengagement in the spring is something that we have aimed to mitigate in 2020, because those months are critically important for investing early and expanding our combined national infrastructure for the nominee. 

So far we’ve been able to beat the springtime lull, by actively following-up with our new donors from acquisition mailings and ads, combing through our suppression lists online and offline to make sure we’re connecting with our long-time supporters, and prioritizing personalized, qualitative, exclusive updates.

Don’t we already treat donors differently online and offline? What makes this special?

For the most part, we can count on these donors to send in high-dollar gifts in major election years through our regular channels without too much extra attention. We already individualize their ask strings in emails and mailings based on their history with us.

However - when a $5,000 check comes in through an acquisition mailing, or in response to a text asking for $5, or through a search ad from a donor who has never given to the DNC before - if we don’t take that as a sign from the donor that they are capable of giving more three- and four-figure contributions, then we are leaving money on the table. 

How do you build a relationship?

Because the DNC had never pursued this kind of connection with mid-level donors before, there were no preexisting relationships to build on when I arrived in October. Not knowing exactly where to begin, I relied heavily on the resources available to Major Gifts Officers online and the three things I knew for sure: 

1. The majority of donors are going to leave you on read.

2. The majority of conversations you have aren’t going to lead to a gift day-of.

3. Everyone who gives to the DNC cares about our work, so you always have one thing in common with the donor! 

So I began reaching out to donors every single day on as many channels as we had available with the sole purpose of opening up opportunities for them to connect with a DNC staffer (that’s me).

We sent:

• An introductory letter from me to 1,000 lapsed donors

• Invitations to meet and get to know each other through a phone call or text

• Handwritten notes on our usual acknowledgements

This kind of relationship-oriented approach is not possible for one person to handle with every single donor. That’s why we spent a lot of time thinking about the different audiences we wanted to target. 

In the end, we narrowed our approach to three main categories so that we can track the success of these efforts.

1. Lapsed mid-level donors 

   1. We target these donors with a lot of personal notes from me, special thank you cards when they give, texts and emails responding to party news and events, etc.

   2. Nearly 30% of these donors have renewed their 2020 support.

2. High performance mid-level donors

3. Additional donors 

   1. This group has organically reached out on their own or self-selected in some way. These are sometimes also referred to as “hand-raisers.”

This might seem like a lot of effort and a long time to spend not directly raising any money and it is! But just like a national campaign data warehouse or battleground campaign infrastructure, building relationships takes time. 

Part of the benefit of having longer conversations is that donors have opportunities to ask questions and hear about our work and we have the opportunity to share exactly why these spring months are so important. Sometimes those conversations lead to five and six-figure contributions, and sometimes they lead to really important indications of what our supporters expect and need from us. 

That’s the work I’m most proud of and most fulfilled by. And it’s the key ingredient to optimizing the donation capacity of these donors. It isn’t rocket science, it’s patiently listening and actually considering the perspectives of any person who has been generous enough to contribute to your cause.

Job opportunities: 

The team at Biden For President is growing by the day! Check out ways to join them here: https://jobs.lever.co/joebiden

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Closing:

It’s my pleasure to get to talk with the DNC’s mid-level donors about the enormous job of electing Democrats. Thanks for taking the time to read about what we’re doing to get ready for November, and please share this newsletter with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in what we’re up to.

And if you’re a mid-level donor manager or a fundraising nerd like me, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Olivia Hill

Leadership Circle Donor Manager, Democratic National Committee

202-430-1887

hillo@dnc.org