It’s June, and you’ve been building up your lists for months through list buys and text rentals. You’ve already bought everyone in your district, and maybe national donors aren’t super responsive to your campaign. But we still have four months to go… What do we try now? We’re here with three suggestions to keep that momentum going until the finish line.
#1: Area Codes From Your District
If you have access to national donors in your list, or you’re trying to identify new national donors, a great way to narrow potential donors is to filter by area code. This helps identify people who have moved out of the district but may still have ties to the district.
Some donors may have moved away for work, but have fond memories of the district, or family still living there. Or retired to another area but spent their whole lives in the district and consider it home. These folks are great potential donors to reach out to who won’t be included in your in-district lists.
This requires a little bit of data work, but it is doable in Excel or with some rudimentary coding skills!
We’ve seen this perform well on text rentals, and while the number of new donors you’ll find via area code varies, any way you can identify donors who care about your district is huge.
#2: Look at Your Out-of-State Donors
Another way to improve performance on national sends, either internally or with rental vendors, is to identify which states are the highest performing for your campaign.
We’ve looked at this across clients, and it does change. Often it’s neighboring states, but sometimes it’s more unexpected. Some states just identify more with some candidates!
In the image above, we can see the locations of donors for a single campaign over the course of a month. You might notice a few hubs, which would be useful states for this campaign to target! (It is easier to pick out the top-engaging states through the numbers, but a map is a fun visualization.)
The image above shows a competitive race in the South, and the top five states with the highest rate of engagement are WV, TN, OK, TN, and ND (excluding the state of the race). Some of these are regional, but North Dakota is a great example that it’s not always the states you’d expect that are the most worth reaching out to.
Identifying top-performing states in a client’s donor list and then narrowing national sends to those states has significantly increased scale on rentals.
#3: Look To “Unconventional” States
Something else to consider is looking beyond the high-income, solid blue states. Traditional advice is to call, text, or email the big donors in states like New York and California. (Anyone who was a call time manager probably remembers doing this, too!)
These states do have amazing donors who will give to out-of-state campaigns. But, the downside is that everyone and their dog (…and their mom and their cousin and their dentist) is also reaching out to the same people.
We’ve run the numbers across all of our sends and clients to find the states with the highest engagement rates – spoiler alert: NY and CA aren’t in the top ten.
There are progressives in every state who are fired up and want to get involved. Don’t box yourself into the big blue states – they have plenty of people to support and get asked all the time. Think about the states that are purple or even red. There are Dems there, too, who want to chip in and aren’t asked.
Keep Looking
The mid-cycle fundraising slump is real, but it doesn’t have to stall your momentum. Filtering by area code can surface donors with real ties to your district who just don’t show up on your in-district lists. Leaning into your highest-performing states (even unexpected ones) can seriously boost your rental scale. And don’t sleep on purple and red states. There are progressives everywhere who want to give and don’t get asked nearly enough. The bottom line: your next best donor probably isn’t who or where you’d expect. Keep looking.
— Circuit