Does this bring in money or votes? Newsletter 20
Hey, it’s Jose – your favorite DNC email director – back again. I’m here today to share how our email program went above and beyond during an election in which building authentic, personal connections with supporters over digital was critical.
The gist: By focusing our efforts on good content, deliverability, and reactivating inactive supporters, the DNC managed to massively scale up both fundraising and organizing to finish the cycle with impressive results. Let’s dive in:
Feature:
In theory, the goals of the DNC’s email program mirror that of the Mobilization team: Bring in money and votes. In practice, we leverage email far more for money than votes.
That’s partially by design – organizing doesn’t scale the same as fundraising over email. But by the spring, as the pandemic grew and the emphasis of our organizing efforts shifted to digital, it was clear we were going to have to rethink our approach.
The key to doing both rested in launching our first-ever dedicated reactivation program, which allowed us to considerably expand our universe of supporters – and the money they gave – without significantly increasing email volume. That, in turn, freed up resources for us to build out our organizing program to meet the moment.
So that’s how we entered the general election: More money, more votes, win the election. And that’s exactly what we did.
Fundraising
On the money side, we continued to break records even as the scope of our team’s work grew. Take a look:
Compared to 2016, our email program increased revenue by 160%, with revenue per email increasing 175% – showing that these gains weren’t just because of increased investments in acquisition.
As I outlined in this newsletter in May, a lot of this strength comes from how our team has remained laser-focused on deliverability throughout the cycle. But what’s particularly exciting is how we built on that work in the final months of the election, standing up a deliverability program that accounted for over 16% of the DNC’s online fundraising revenue in the final quarter of the election.
Reactivation
The DNC’s online fundraising program is nearly two decades old, and we have millions of inactive supporters we no longer contact.
We set out to build a thoughtful and systematic way of reengaging them – one that wouldn’t get us in spam jail and could give us insights that would help us continue this work in future cycles. Led by Anna Kelsey, who joined us this summer from the Warren campaign, our program took a twofold approach:
First, we did a series of one-off reactivation sends in big moments, expanding our sending universe to include inactive prospects.
The most extreme example of this was immediately following the announcement of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s pick for vice president, when we emailed our entire inactive file and reactivated 875,000 supporters. But it wasn’t just that moment – convention speeches, fundraising deadlines, and emails from high-profile surrogates were all opportunities for us to bring people back into the fold.
Second, we created a number of cohorts based on different engagement factors and ran them all through the same automated series to compare performance. These cohorts, based on data like total opens, donation history, status on the OFA and HFA lists, and more, allowed us to compare more factors against each other – data that is unique to the age and scope of the DNC’s program and that will help guide this work in the future.
Watch this space for a newsletter from Anna diving into this work with more depth. In the meantime, I’ll say this: By focusing on reactivation, we were able to keep revenue climbing upward without significantly increasing email volume — which freed up resources for us to focus on the votes side of our program.
Digital Organizing
Alongside our digital organizing team, we built out the most robust organizing email programs in the DNC’s history. That work included:
An automated email chase program for IWillVote.com, which used Action Network’s ladders tool and the voter file to urge supporters who requested voter registration and vote-by-mail applications via IWillVote.com to complete their applications.
(You can read more about the IWillVote.com chase program here.)
Voter education pushes in 17 battleground states. Each explained exactly how, where, and when folks could vote in their state, with a sharable video featuring President Barack Obama.
State-targeted rapid response emails in response to litigation and other changes in voting rule in places like Pennsylvania and Florida.
A chase series to supporters with outstanding mail-in ballots asking them to complete their ballots. The last email of the series, sent on October 20, told supporters to return their mail-in ballots to the nearest dropbox.
An automated voter engagement welcome series for IWillVote.com. Supporters who completed the information capture on IWillVote.com received a series of organizing touchpoints, including getting a virtual commit to vote card, an ask to make their plan to vote on MakeAPlan.com, and an ask to volunteer with the Biden campaign.
Our data on the impact of these organizing touchpoints is limited, but what we have is encouraging – for example, over 65% of people who opened an email from our automated IWillVote.com chase emails completed their vote-by-mail applications.
Job opportunities:
How about you hire a member of Biden for President’s outstanding digital team? Check out our directory here.
🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵
Closing:
I’m extremely proud of the program the DNC’s email team ran this cycle. We respected our supporters, met them where they were (even amid a pandemic), and brought in the money and votes needed to carry Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House – all in all, a job well done.
Until next time,
Jose