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'21 Client Success Stories - P2P Fundraising Pro Mike Testa
This campaign has been successfully raising money through texting for years. These tips and message examples will inspire voters to donate all cycle long.
It’s official - fundraising for the 2022 election cycle is underway. Now is the time to begin building a reliable base of donors to support you through the primary season and make it to November. Even if you are a texting veteran, keeping up to date on the latest best practices will keep your fundraising programs ahead of the curve and engage voters all cycle long.
If you have not tried fundraising with P2P texting yet or are looking for ways to improve, we have you covered. Take it from the text-to-fundraise pro Lauren Casper herself:
"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."
Here are three examples of real fundraising messages from the Mike Testa campaign and best practices you need for successful fundraising in 2022:
1) Q1 Fundraising
Testa’s team is second to none when it comes to engaging messages. The texts they send are always compelling and conversational, similar to how you would text a friend or family member. This message style encourages participation and resonates well with supporters. A mistake many of those who are new to P2P texting make is writing messages in the same formal tone as an email or mail piece, which do not resonate well in a text.
This message example also included an MMS attachment which has been shown to increase engagement and response rates by 50%. There are several reasons why this works well:
- You can include more information in an image than what a standard 320 character message can fit
- You can provide vital context and imagery to the message that strengthens its ability to resonate with voters
- You can include your official logo and build visual recognition
- You can often bypass spam issues that frequently arise with regular SMS messages
Their image hit all of these points. The clever use of the shape of New Jersey as a meter for his campaign’s fundraising goal provided his audience with a clear picture of how their donation will make a difference. Including Testa’s photo in the attachment also helped facilitate more face recognition, which is important even as the incumbent in his district.
Testa’s team also understands a vital but often underused tactic to turn supporters into super-supporters. This tactic is so easy you probably use it everyday – treating the texting channel as a conversational tool. In other words, the team makes a point of responding to people who take the time to reply to their messages.
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!
2) Fundraising Event Invitation
This message example is written just as well as the previous example but faced more challenges.
The MMS attachment they included contained all the information about a breakfast event without requiring people to click an external link, which many are unwilling to do. While some people cannot afford the ticket price or to take time off of work, the campaign made sure to include all their supporters.
Even though this supporter could not make it to the event, they sent back some positive words of support for Testa. The response from the team acknowledging the supporter and encouraging them to come to the next event was greatly appreciated.
This extra care to respond to supporters, even if they could not complete the CTA intended with the message, increases the likelihood that they will continue supporting Testa and donate to his campaign in the future.
3) Election Week Fundraising
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.
One technical strategy in this message (as well as the previous messages) is that the included links are shortened with our custom URL shortener. This is important because free link shorteners, such as bit.ly, often get messages caught in carrier spam filters. Our list of custom link shorteners is constantly rotated to prevent this from happening, and using shortened links instead of full links gives you more characters to use when writing messages.
Testa’s team also utilized many behind-the-scenes strategies enabled by our platform’s unique tools and features to help them save time during the busy week leading up to election day.
They took full advantage of our Tap-then-Send responses with corresponding tags because they anticipated common responses they would need to send, such as “Thank you!”. This allowed their team to send responses in just two clicks, and tag voters’ contact cards as they shared information about themselves in replies.
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!
Summary of Best Practices for P2P Fundraising Messages
- Write conversational messages to avoid formal language resembling an email. Conversational messages resonate better with people.
- Including clear opt-out language 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.
- Avoid excessive all-caps and exclamatory punctuation to avoid striking the wrong tone.
- Use MMS attachments!
- Shorten links to your fundraising page using our Custom URL Shortener to ensure your message does not go to spam.
- Respond to replies from people, made easy with our Tap-then-Send Response tool, to turn supporters into super supporters.
- Tag voters for easy segmentation and identification.
- Devise a clever connection in the message to the suggested contribution amount to contribute to get people’s attention.
Bottom Line
With these examples and best practices in hand, you can be sure that your P2P fundraising messages will have the best chance possible for succeeding. Be sure to check out our other fundraising articles for even more inspiration.
Want to get started with P2P texting? Sign up with RumbleUp today at rumbleup.com. If you have more questions about RumbleUp please contact our sales team at (833) 530-4400 or sales@rumbleup.com to discuss how texting can best work for you.
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