How does your fundraising support your advocacy?

In our experience with online campaigners, there’s a well-worn (if not always well-articulated or well-explained) connection between advocacy programs and fundraising. Online advocacy is good for list-building and cultivation, and big lists are good for online fundraising. If you’re an online campaigner and you haven’t hit send on an advocacy ask to your list just to “keep the list engaged” and encourage better conversion in fundraising email series, then you’re lonely in our field.

Today one of us had the pleasure of an off-the-record conversation with a leading online campaigner who mentioned a thought-provoking question she’d heard on a recent webinar: how does your fundraising support your advocacy?

On the webinar, the question was meant to provoke the obvious answer: fundraising doesn’t support advocacy, it’s the other way around. We’d like to suggest three ideas to shift this conventional wisdom:

1. Money is power in politics (and therefore policy), so communicate your power.

Communicate the size of your donor base as well as the size of your list in key districts. You’ve got a big list of people who are willing to at least be clicktivists – what percentage of them have also voted with their wallets by donating to the cause? These are political donors, and they matter to electeds at all levels. Let your fundraising bolster your political power by linking the two.

(In case you missed it, last week’s 3 things was on making the most of your money in politics: www.englin.net/political-money.)

2. Recruit your donors to the higher rungs of your advocacy engagement ladder.

Few things show more commitment than forking over hard-earned cash (which is part of the reason political donors have a loud voice in decision-makers’ ears.) When you need to deliver just a few high-level phone calls to a decision-maker or place a critical op-ed in a local paper, consider calling on your most active donors (not necessarily your biggest givers, but those donors who’ve given time and again, too) with a direct, personal appeal to make their money go even farther by taking this critical action. Don’t send a mass email – make a phone call or send a personal email (from your own email account). We know this probably involves crossing many internal political barriers and winning not a few internal battles, but maybe this is worth it. Converting donors to activists is notoriously hard, but it’s usually only attempted at the lower levels of engagement. See if your donors aren’t responding to your clicktivism asks because they’ve already climbed a few rungs.

3. Advanced tip: map your donors and your targets’ donors. Communicate the overlap.

If you’ve got a particularly intractable target, see if you can grab their attention by showing that you’ve got some sway with their donors. Put some time into research the overlapping donors – who donates to you and to the Congressperson, City Council member, or County Board member you’re trying to reach? Demonstrating that you’ve got a base of support in common (the most generous approach) or that you’re ready to let an elected’s donors know how he’s let them down (the take-no-prisoners approach) is a rarely used but highly valuable tactic.

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