Financial reports and analysis of Q1 and Q2 fundraising this cycle have painted a concerning picture. Donor competition is fierce, and the state of the economy has many small-dollar donors hesitant to offer their support, which has effectively flatlined fundraising efforts for Republicans during a critical midterm election cycle.
The Center for Campaign Innovation led a survey of Republican digital fundraising professionals and found that the “majority (70%) said online fundraising in the first quarter of 2022 underperformed their expectations.”
In the same survey, the digital fundraising pros were asked to rank different fundraising channels in terms of performance. Unsurprisingly, text messaging channels took the second and third spots after house file emails in this lineup tactics to raise money preferred by professionals.
But why is this the case? What makes peer to peer texting such an effective channel for fundraising? It’s simple - the pivotal success factor to raise funds in a recession is having personal and authentic relationships with donors who sincerely believe in your candidate or cause.
With peer to peer texting, you can engage in direct conversation with donors and gather invaluable zero party data from the information they share, which is difficult to achieve on other channels.
Now, with less than 50 days left till the election, an effective fundraising campaign is more crucial than ever. Even if you are a peer to peer texting veteran, keeping up to date on the latest best practices will keep your fundraising programs ahead of the curve and engage voters through these final weeks.
If you have not tried fundraising with our P2P text messaging service yet or are looking for ways to improve, we have you covered. Here are three real fundraising examples that use text messages with an analysis of best practices to help you transform your fundraising through the election:
Ronchetti is an example of a candidate that has not experienced the fundraising woes many others have faced this year. Most of his fundraising support has come from small-dollar donors, with nearly all contributions coming from New Mexican residents!
The text does not contain commonly overused impact and matching language and instead has a clear CTA asking for support keeping a new ad on the air. Communicating to donors exactly what their donations will be used for will help them more easily determine whether or not they would like to support the campaign’s efforts.
Similarly, this text avoids excessive use of all-caps and exclamatory punctuation commonly seen in fundraising texts, which can strike the wrong tone if used too often. They also included clear opt-out language, which is a key factor in improving the delivery rate of your message and makes recipients feel that they are in control if they do not wish to be contacted.
The Ronchetti campaign followed an extremely important best practice with their message by making sure to send text messages with MMS attachment. Adding a picture, GIF, or video attachment has been shown to increase engagement and response rates by 50%. There are several reasons why this works well:
Featured in our previous blog, "How Nativ3 Mobilized for Victory in Minnesota with P2P Texting,," we highlighted Dr. Scott Jensen's campaign and its intense competition to secure the Minnesota GOP endorsement last May. The Jensen campaign leveraged peer-to-peer texting for various purposes, including fundraising. Remarkably, some of their fundraising texts, like the one below, raised $12,000-$15,000 with less than $400 spent.
One of the elements that make this text so effective is the compelling storytelling that ends with a call to action advising how much to donate and, like Ronchetti’s text, explicitly what the funding will be used for.
The text is also written with conversational language instead of formal language resembling an email, which resonates better with people on peer to peer texting channels. The MMS attachment adds more context and support for the story painted in the text, strengthening the persuasiveness of the message.
Since the GOTV rush is right around the corner, we wanted to feature a GOTV fundraising text from 2021 that produced impressive results.
Lauren Casper, the Finance Director at Mike Testa for Senate, had this to say about their fundraising texts:
“Our fundraising programs really took off with RumbleUp because of how effectively we were able to prospect new donors with quick questions, tag their responses and segment people into groups for follow up. This ties perfectly into our digital lead gen and the ability to instantly respond to each person who texts back was a game changer.”
-Lauren Casper, former Finance Director at Mike Testa for Senate
This fundraising text was sent one week before the 2021 election and asked for specific small-dollar contributions. The clever connection of the amount of time before election day to the suggested contribution amount is a great way to get people’s attention.
Testa’s team took full advantage of our Tap-then-Send responses with corresponding tags because they anticipated common responses they would need to send. This allowed their team to send responses such as “Thank you!” and add a tag in just two clicks.
The team can now filter by these tags for easy segmenting and responding, which they have utilized for years to make hyper-targeted lists for all kinds of use cases, including fundraising!
The voter in this example responded directly to the question posed in the text, and after receiving a response from the team, they successfully donated. This person is now much more likely to continue donating in the future because the campaign’s engagement demonstrated that their time and effort are seen and appreciated!
We hope you find these examples useful in crafting your own effective fundraising messages for successful texting outreach in the final stages of this election cycle.
Want to get started with P2P texting? Sign up with RumbleUp today at rumbleup.com.
RumbleUp is the market leader in peer-to-peer texting, trusted by over 3,000 campaigns, political campaigns, nonprofit organizations, and more to quickly engage any size audience via SMS, MMS, or video text. We make mass texting easy, fast, and scalable with the best customer support.
If you have more questions about RumbleUp, please contact our sales team at (833) 530-4400 or sales@rumbleup.com to discuss how our peer-to-peer texting platform is your best option.