Go to content Go to navigation Go to search

July 28, 2008

Fund-Raising Lessons From the Obama Campaign

John Brian McCarthy says he was shocked when he went through his mail recently and found a direct-mail solicitation for Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

The reason?

It was the first piece of non-electronic communication Mr. McCarthy has received from the campaign. And it caused the Arlington, Va., marketing consultant to think about what the Obama campaign’s fund-raising strategy foreshadows for nonprofit groups.

“I’ve been donating online since February, but even the thank you’s for my online donations came in via e-mail, with no supplemental thank you/re-ask message arriving in the mail,” wrote Mr. McCarthy, on the blog maintained by his employer, Beaconfire Consulting in Arlington, Va.

“How is it that Obama for America could shatter all fund-raising records with small donations, without making direct mail a central part of their strategy?”

Mr. McCarthy says the campaign relies primarily on three approaches to soliciting:

• Traditional e-mail solicitations.

• Online advertising on social networking sites and blogs.

• Social media Web sites like Facebook and the candidate’s own online social network.

Those tools allowed Mr. Obama’s staff to be much more flexible in their communications, to respond more quickly with communications to potential donors at key points in the campaign, and to develop a much larger pool of supporters than more traditional solicitation and recruitment techniques.

The lesson for nonprofit groups?

Mr. McCarthy writes that charities will be able to use similar approaches to attract more small-money donations, though they will probably need to continue to use conventional methods to attract big gifts.

“Those organizations that embrace the Internet in their fund-raising programs aren’t guaranteed to see the same astronomical small donor fund raising that the Obama campaign experienced, but as time goes on, they’re likely to see greater dividends than ever before,” he writes.

(To read more about the lessons the political campaign offer to fund raisers, see this article from The Chronicle of Philanthropy.)

— Peter Panepento

Monday July 28, 2008 | Permalink

Comments

1. Perhaps I received the same mailing. For my part, I was very disappointed to see that the enclosure copied excerpts from speeches from February and March 2008. Seems like a wasted opportunity — couldn’t they have used more recent material?

   — J. Lindberg    Jul 29, 06:42 PM    #

Commenting is closed for this article.

Previous: Charities Will Soon Face Global Competition for Donors, Fund Raiser Predicts
Next: Online Fund-Raising Groups Merge

---

Copyright © 2009 The Chronicle of Philanthropy