Hey everybody! My name is Rachel Alexander and I work as an Email and SMS Strategist here at the DNC. This past election cycle, I was responsible for organizing all of our split fundraising content for Senate candidates across the country. Through our split program, we were able to raise a whopping $4.5 million dollars across email and SMS directly for Democratic Senate candidates and I’m super excited to share some of the amazing work that our team produced to raise such an incredible amount.
Why We Started Splits
The stakes were incredibly high in this year’s midterm elections. With abortion rights, health care access, Social Security and Medicare, and more on the line, we knew it was incredibly important to support Senate races however we could. These races had the power to determine how our country would look in 2023, 2024, and for years to come.
Our team wanted to utilize the millions of users in our database who had engaged with previous split fundraising content to do the following:
Uplift the profiles and work of Democratic candidates to the DNC’s email and SMS subscribers.
Raise money directly for those campaigns.
Identify and reactivate hundreds of thousands of lapsed supporters who had given to previous split fundraising content in 2018, 2020, and the 2021 Georgia runoffs.
Here’s how we did it:
The Set Up
We got involved as early as we could – identifying where we could be most helpful in supporting Democratic Senate incumbents early on. We sent our first emails in February 2022 – and clearly branded those campaigns. We gave folks an opportunity to opt-out because we knew that some people might not be ready to tune into the 2022 midterm cycle just yet.
We worked with our Analytics team to help optimize email performance and to ensure as many of our supporters as possible had a chance to donate to these campaigns. We also prioritized personalized content and rapid response moments (shout out to our Communications and Research teams for their speedy approvals!) to keep our program on the cutting edge.
Reactivation: We worked with our Analytics team to identify high-propensity donors to congressional campaigns who had since lapsed in their engagement on the DNC’s email list. We used personalized copies to call out a user’s previous support in an attempt to reactivate their support and partnered with deliverability experts at Validity to ensure top performance. These efforts often increased revenue on a single email send by 15% or more.
Personalization: To help our emails stick out in folks’ inboxes ahead of November, our team relied on our institutional data to power conditional content. Through personalization, we were able to thank donors for their previous giving, while also prompting them to make a unique contribution split with a campaign. We took specific care to acknowledge if folks had made split contributions in the past as well. Take a look:
We found that personalized subject lines won subject line tests a majority of the time, and even doubled – sometimes tripled – conversion rates when tested against non-personalized subject lines. Overall, personalization improved our fundraising results, and the overall experience for our subscribers and donors by acknowledging their invaluable support.
Rapid Response and Top-performing Content: In a year with hundreds of races, it can be hard to focus the spotlight on any one candidate or campaign. We took advantage of key moments in the news to run a current, timely, and relevant program that talked to supporters about what they may have been seeing or hearing on the airwaves or online. It’s no surprise that we found that our rapid response content performed the best. For example, the crudité email in support of the Fetterman campaign smashed the performance of any other Senate split email we sent prior to that moment, raising nearly six figures – over three times more than a usual email.
These tactics, the incredible campaigns we partnered with, and our team here at the DNC came together to build an unmatched split fundraising program in 2022.
The Numbers
Through Election Day on November 8, our team:
Sent 130 emails and SMS for 11 Senate candidates in states like Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Washington
Raised over $4.5 million for Senate campaigns through email and SMS – a historic amount that surpassed our previous split fundraising records – making the split sends some of our highest-performing content
But What About-?
You may be thinking that all this is great, but what about the hundreds of other races that could’ve used a program like that? While the DNC’s engagement for the split series was limited to federal races, we were able to show our support for non-federal races by sending emails to our list asking our subscribers to sign up for other campaign’s email lists. This series generated new leads for these campaigns, and potentially sent new donors their way as well.
Maybe The Real Split Series Was the Friends We Made Along the Way
So, what now? What happens to the Senate split program now?
In the leadup to Sen. Raphael Warnock’s December 6 runoff election, we raised an additional $2.4 million directly for his campaign.
We’re proud of the work we’ve put in – and will apply these learnings on personalization, reactivation, and rapid response to the split program next cycle (not to mention to the email and SMS program as it currently exists) – and the work of our incredible split fundraising partners across the country. It was an honor to work alongside so many talented, innovative, and intelligent people who made all this work possible.
When looking at the success of Democrats in the midterm elections, coupled with the incredibly successful stats of this program, it’s clear that Dems are indeed in array. 💅🔵
