Fundraising

I'd like to try a little experiment here . . .

Earlier this year, I joined the board of the Young Voter PAC, an organization that has long been an advocate for young people in politics and a great friend to Future Majority.

The Young Voter PAC works to make sure that politicians pay attention to the youth vote and that young voters have a voice in the process. In non-PR-speak, that means that they teach candidates and campaigns best practices for reaching out to young voters, work with state parties on young voter outreach, and reward candidates who demonstrate a commitment to young voters. In the past, they have supported Scott Kleeb, Jon Tester, Patrick Murphy, Darcy Burner, Lois Murphy, Harry Mitchell, Patricia Madrid and many others.

The Young Voter PAC does more than just cut checks to candidates. They also work tirelessly behind the scenes to advocate for young people in the Democratic Party. This year alone, YVP supported Iowa students through scholarships to cover travel costs for college students returning to Iowa to participate in the caucuses, and they pushed back hard against the Clinton campaign for suggesting that Iowa students be disenfranchised. They've helped bring big-name candidates like Jared Polis and Scott Kleeb here to Future Majority, for our live-blogging sessions, and in partnership with Future Majority, Living Liberally and others, YVP is organizing young voter events at Netroots Nation and the Democratic Convention.

I've set a personal goal of finding 50 people to support the work of Young Voter PAC. I don't care how much we raise - that's not really important. Most youth organizing is supported by large checks cut by a very small cadre of donors. That is hugely problematic, and it's a situation disliked by both organizers, who fear their funding may disappear on a whim, and the donors, who would like youth organizations to become self sustaining.

The only way out of this bind is for youth organizations to cultivate small and mid-level donor bases. That's why the number of donors - not the amount raised - is so important. It will show major donors that the Young Voter PAC can attract small donors, making it more attractive as an investment for them and hopefully move it on the path to self-sustainability. So please, give whatever you can, no matter how small. Your voice, and your participation, are more important than the amount you can contribute.

We want politicians to pay attention to young people, and we want young people to have a voice in campaigns. Young Voter PAC is one way to change the faces of elections: who participates and who wins. Your support can help do that. It's time we make an investment in the people who represent us in Democratic politics.

Raising money for youth organizing - even straight voter registration - can be tough. So kudos to HeadCount or an innovative fundraising strategy that draws on their greatest strenghts: artist relationships. And kudos to all the artists for stepping up like this to support a kindred organization that does good work.

From a press release issued by Head Count (emphasis mine):

More than a dozen artists and promoters are backing HeadCount by agreeing to donate 50 cents from the sale of each ticket at participating concerts to support the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization’s voter registration campaign. These concerts, which include six national festivals as well as events at the world famous Red Rocks Amphitheater, have all been branded with the banner of “Cents For Sense.” This integrated fundraising and message initiative is expected to raise close to $75,000 and help HeadCount (www.HeadCount.org) achieve its goal of registering 100,000 voters before November’s election.

The festival lineup consists of Summer Camp, Mountain Jam, High Sierra, All Good Music Festival, Camp Bisco, and Gathering of the Vibes. Labor Day weekend concerts by The Allman Brothers Band and Bob Weir & RatDog (August 30th) and Gov’t Mule and Umphrey’s McGee (August 31st) are also participants in the Cents for Sense campaign.

“We set out to find a way that bands and promoters can support the cause and put a real voter participation message behind their concerts,” said Marc Brownstein, HeadCount’s co-chair and the bass player for the popular electronic rock band The Disco Biscuits. “We’re really touched by the outpouring of support.”

So how much is the youth vote worth this year? Apparently $500,000 a pop if you are a superdelegate.

The Huffington Post is running a shocker of a piece claiming that Clinton donor Haim Saban offered the Young Democrats of America access to $1 million in funds if their two remaining superdelegates - David Hardt and Crystal Strait - endorsed Sen. Clinton:

One of Sen. Hillary Clinton's top financial supporters offered $1 million to the Young Democrats of America during a phone conversation in which he also pressed for the organization's two uncommitted superdelegates to endorse the New York Democrat, a high-ranking official with YDA told The Huffington Post.

Haim Saban, the billionaire entertainment magnate and longtime Clinton supporter, denied the allegation. But four independent sources said that just before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Saban called YDA President David Hardt and offered what was perceived as a lucrative proposal: $1 million would be made available for the group if Hardt and the organization's other uncommitted superdelegate backed Clinton.

YDA isn't answering anymore questions about this incident on the record, but if this is true, all I can say is "good for the Young Democrats!" for turning the offer down. At a time when Sen. Obama's campaign is threatening to defund 527 organizations (YDA is a 527), and many progressive youth organizations still struggle to raise their yearly budgets, YDA's leadership, this could not have been an easy choice for YDA leaders. $1 million is a substantial portion of YDA's yearly budget. This was the ultimate Faustian bargain dangled in front of them and they turned it down. They made the ethical choice to forgo what might be best for themselves politically and faithfully represent the will of their constituents in the nominating process.

It was even braver considering the potential fallout from other donors close to Saban:

Members of the Young Democrats agonized about the potential fallout of Saban's call; his financial offer represented one-third of the group's 2008 budget. Democratic officials and fundraisers were consulted about how to respond, and at times the discussions were "emotional," one participant said. "It is scary for them, Haim is very powerful, he has great influence over donors who give to them."

Another source said that Hardt and others were acutely aware of Saban's status within Democratic circles and were concerned that their organization would suffer long-term harm if they declined his offer or if news of the proposal became public.

It's a rather unfortunate dynamic in progressive politics that such donors have so much influence over the process, but that's how it works. Usually it's not even accurate to talk of donors, but rather "donor networks." If you piss-off the wrong donor, their network can be closed to you forever. So it was a gutsy move for YDA to snub a major donor like that. But I'm convinced it was the right move. Taking that money would have been disastrous for YDA in a number of ways -- not least in that endorsing Sen. Clinton over Obama would put the YDA leadership totally out of touch from the will of the surging youth vote, the very people they are supposed to represent. In terms of organizational branding and PR, it would most likely be taken as indicative of an organizational culture in which the leadership worked to protect and further their own political advancement at the expense of the membership. If YDA had taken the deal, those observations would have been right. Kudos to them for doing the right thing.

So where do YDA endorsements stand? Last week, Crystal Strait endorsed Sen. Obama. Her counterpart, Francisco Domenech, endorsed Clinton months ago. David Hardt, the President of YDA, and the person to whom the offer was allegedly made, has yet to endorse a candidate. Last week he released a statement indicating that he would wait until all votes were cast before making his endorsement.

By the by, this is yet another reason why I think my arguments for more transparency, and some basic guidelines, in how YDA and CDA superdelegates cast their ballots are called for and indeed long overdue.

Bumped - Mike

In the wake of articles discussing the destruction of the Republican brand, it is important to look at our own organizations and chapters as brands.

There are some activists that get very angry any time someone refers to a political party, organization, or candidate as a brand, saying that democracy is not a business and all that jazz. Regardless of that utopian view of the political world, your organization's branding and fundraising is pretty similar to the business world.

As a political advocacy/outreach organization your "product" is the impact you will have in reaching a political outcome. For non-partisan voter registration organizations this is new voters. For partisan youth organizations this is getting young voters out to vote as Democrats, and thereby electing Democrats to office.

When you ask a potential donor to contribute money to your organization, they expect a return on their investment (ROI). While in the business world ROI normally refers to revenue, in the advocacy world it is the impact your organization will have in reaching shared goals (your product). The opportunity cost of a donor's contribution to your organization is a contribution to another organization (In actuality, the opportunity cost is anything that could be purchased by the amount of their donation, but we will assume that they have allocated that amount to political contributions). Your organization needs to have the reputation of being extremely successful in reaching its desired outcomes, or else a donor will look somewhere else.

Your brand, then, is essentially the general perception that is held about your organization. Most importantly, what you stand for and the expectations of your efficacy.

Your brand is also what your organization is associated with in people's minds. Are you seen as energetic, active, and hip? Or are you seen as boring, lackluster, and weak? The conceptions people hold and adjectives they would use to describe your organization are extremely powerful.

Maintaining your organization's brand image is extremely important. Recovering a brand that has a tarnished reputation is much harder than building up a brand from scratch.

Here are some tips for developing and monitoring your brand:

Keep track of what people are saying about you.

This involves media monitoring and listening to your supporters. Check out my post on media monitoring for ideas. Frequently ask your members and supporters what they think about the organization and what they have heard people say about it. Word of mouth is extremely powerful and you don't want to let anything negative slip passed you unanswered.

Decide what you want your brand to be.

When companies start out they spend a lot of time determining what the goals of their brand are. A lot of political organizations don't. Think about what adjectives you would want people to use when describing your organization, and then create a plan that would result in that. It is important that your branding is carried out over all aspects of your organization. If you want people to describe you as energetic and active, you don't want to have a boring website that is rarely updated. Your brand is your message. Don't stray off message.

Do your absolute best.

The best marketing team in the world would have a nearly impossible time making an organization that doesn't do anything look like it is extremely active and effective. That is why you need to do everything you can to make your organization the best it can be. In the world of political activism, where your products are results, hard work and continued effort are the best ways to build your brand.

Been traveling a lot this week and my browser has a gagillion open tabs of stuff I meant to blog. Here they are. I'll try to have a recap of the Demos Better Deal Conference posted later.

• Paul Rosenberg has a detailed post documenting all the ways in which McCain has failed to support the troops. - Open Left
• The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) agrees with Webb - McCain is full of it in his opposition to the GI Bill. And they have the stats to prove it. - Think Progress
• Micah Sifry has an interesting post on "Voter File 2.0" and Catalist's plans for the future. - Tech President
• The blogosphere is starting to wonder why YDA and CDA Super delegates have yet to endorse Senator Obama. - Americablog
• Rock the Vote has calculated that Young Voter turnout this year increased by 2.2 million over turnout in the 2000 and 2004 primaries. - Rock the Vote
• More reportage on Obama's success in raising small dollar donations, particularly from young people. - The Politico
• Congress is fast-tracking a student loan bill, though whether that is a good or bad thing for students in the long-term is still unclear to me. - The Politico
• The Millennial Makeover authors argue that Clinton and Obama supporters arguing over the strength of their coalitions just don't get it; demography is destiny for the Democratic Party. - Huffington Post
• Where is the next generation of philanthropists? - Tactical Philanthropy
• More kvetching about the lack of protest music. Will they never stop whining about this? - Huffington Post
• Clay Shirky discusses our "cognitive surplus" and what it means for human information production and organizing. - Open Left
• Andrew Kohut explores the widening generation gap in how voters cast their ballots. - New York Times

I thought this was pretty cool. Green Owl Records has gotten together with over a dozen artists to make a compilation CD on behalf of the Energy Action Coalition.

These kinds of things can be great fundraisers for cash strapped organizations if you have the artist connections and can swing it. When MFA did the Future Soundtrack for America in partnership with Barsuk Records, MoveOn and McSweeney's, we raised over a quarter million dollars for our 2005 budget. I know that Punk Voter also sold over half a million copies of its Rock Against Bush compilations, though I'm not sure how much money that raised directly for the organization.

Here are the participating artists:

The Appletrees -"Look up to the Sky"
Feist - "Honey Honey" (BBC Session)
Harper Simon - "Henrieta"
Young Love - "Underground"
Muse - "Knights of Cydonia" (live)
The Exit - "Hey Man"
Of Montreal - "Feminine Effects"
Pete Yorn - "Old Boy"
The London Souls - "Someday"
The Citizens Band - "Fortune Teller"
Violens "Trance Like Turn"
Bloc Party "The Prayer" (Hadouken remix)
School of Seven Bells "Trance Figure"
Deerhoof "Plus 81" (BBC Session)
Juliana Hatfield "Back To Freedom"
Satori "Intimate Revolution"

It turns out that the much-fabled "Colbert Bump" is real. In a paper titled The Colbert bump in Campaign Donations: More Truthful Than Truthy (pdf), James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego proves that Democrats appearing on the show receive 44% more money in the month following the appearance than those who do not appear:

As you can see, he also posits a Republican "Colbert Bust," though the data is less reliable.

So much for Nancy Pelosi's suggestion that Democrats stay far away from the Colbert Report.

(Hat Tip Chris Suellentrop)

Update: Matt B-H writes to note that the results of the competition are still subject to verification and will not be final for about a month.

Matt Browner-Hamlin reminds me that on Friday the FaceBook Giving Challenge came to a close, with Love Without Boundaries securing the $50,000 grand prize. The competition raised thousands of dollars for over a dozen different non-profit organizations and pioneered a new best practice for Foundations looking to assist a wide range of organizations with more than a one-time cash infusion.

Sponsored by what looks to be a $250,000 grant from the Case Foundation, and administered by the company responsible for building the "Causes" application, the contest created a highly competitive environment that encouraged small non-profit organizations to raise money and build a large, small-dollar donor lists. The Giving Challenge accomplished this through a two-stage structure.

The first stage was a series of daily contests beginning on December 14th and ending on February 1st. Each day, all participating non-profits engaged in a 24 hour competition to raise not the most money from their members, but rather to raise money from the largest number of unique donors. An organization with 100 donors would beat an organization with 90 donors for that 24 hour time period regardless of the total dollar amount raised. The winner for each 24 hour period received a $1000 prize.

This structure spurred many organizations to pick specific days and use them as rallying points for their memberships. The Case Foundation distributed $50,000 in this first stage of the competition.

The second stage looked at the total amount of donors for the full 50 days of the competition. The organization with the largest unique donor list won the $50,000 grand prize. The second and third place organizations each received $25,000. The next 10 highest each received $10,000.

The contest is significant for a number of reasons, but most exciting is the way that it is spurring many small non-profits to build a donor network. It accomplished this by creating an environment in which organizations had a chance to win a not-insignificant chunk of their yearly budget, and by keeping the threshold for meaningful participation very low (a $10 dollar donation helps just as much as a $100 donation, democratizing the process).

Matt Browner-Hamlin, who used to work for Students for a Free Tibet, one of the runners-up, explains:

The Tibetan Freedom Movement, SFT’s cause for the giving challenge, has over 4,750 members. 2,190 of those members have donated at least once, and counting. Since I took the screen cap five minutes ago, 150 more people have donated in support of Tibetan freedom. That is one of the highest members to donors conversation rates on Facebook causes. Over the last 49 days, SFT has raised over $60,000 through the challenge, including enough individual donations in 24 hour periods to win nine days.

Students for a Free Tibet is not a big organization. When I worked there, only four other people were on staff in the New York headquarters (now there are six staffers in HQ). In my years, the annual budget was around $350,000; it was closer to $400,000 this year. If SFT wins out in the challenge, they will likely have raised over 25% of their budget in 50 days, a truly incredible output for such a small organization. By contrast, LWB had a budget of $1.2 million last year, four times larger than SFT.

Matt also notes that the contest spurred a lot of creativity on the part of SFT in how they engaged their members, including happy hour events with WiFi and laptops set up, and members pushing the competition out to their family and social networks.

He also correctly notes that only two organizations made a highly-committed and serious run at the grand prize - SFT and Love Without Borders, both of which amassed over 4,500 donors. I'm not so quick, however, to dismiss the other participants and the impact this competition had on their own bottom lines.

The League of Young Voters, for instance, made a push only a few times to win the daily prize. They managed to capture that title twice, netting $2000, and their efforts earned them a spot in the $10,000 prize range. In addition, they raised $13,696 from 786 members. So all told, they raised just over $25,000. That's not an insignificant number for them, and that is in addition to the list they built, which they may can tap again in the future with targeted fundraising campaigns (i.e. "we need to raise X amount in X weeks to fund a staffer in Ohio for 2008).

I'm not privy to the budgets of the other participating organizations, but I imagine that this competition provided both valuable funds and list-building to all of them. The Case Foundation, it appears, has discovered a highly efficient structure to provide what amounts to a de facto matching grant to at least a dozen organizations at once. More incredibly, it created a system that moves all of those organizations closer to sustainability. That's a significant achievement, and one that begins to make good on the promise that many young people and poli-tech enthusiasts saw in the FaceBook Causes application when it first launched.

Most pertinent to youth organizers, this contest and any future iterations provides a model for organizational development that can at least begin overcome one of the most significant hurdles to sustainable youth organizing - building a donor base out of a young membership with huge amounts of disposable income, but very little willingness to spend it on political/activist causes. Very impressive all around, and certainly something to watch in the future.

The League of Young Voters, one of the most inclusive, kick-ass youth organizations around is competing in a Facebook Giving Challenge for $50,000. But they need to rack up more "unique donors" than their competing organizations. It doesn't matter how much they raise, what matters is how big their donor base is.

If you donate to their cause today, they have a chance of winning $1,000 for their organization. If you donate between now and February 1st, they have a chance at winning $50,000 - which would be a huge boost and help them launch more programs, hire more staff, etc. for 2008.

I just gave $10. If you can, go throw a little bit of cash their way. It's a great cause, and even if they don't win it's money well-spent.

First a meta note. Sorry traffic is slow the last day or two. As I mentioned, I've got book deadlines and Yearly Kos this week, so posting will be slow or come in sharp staccato blasts like this and the previous post. Normal blogging will resume on Sunday.

Also, apologies for the comment spam lately. Those crafty spammers have outwitted our filter and I'm trying to keep them off the site as best I can. If you see a comment called "people," stay away. (Unless you are into online gambling and natural male enhancement, in which case, dive in).

Now, onto the real stuff.

Check out this cool little new FaceBook App: Razoo Speed Granting.

From what I can tell, it's sort of Digg.com meets the Causes App. Razoo sets up mini "granting periods." The first (and current) granting period is open, later grants will have themes. Anyone can submit a proposal. Once a certain number of folks vote for, or "validate," a proposal, it becomes visible on the site for public voting. At the end of the granting period, votes are tallied and the winner is awarded the prize.

I can't quite figure out Razoo's angle. They say they are doing this to promote social entrepreneurship, but are they funded by a philanthropic angel? A Foundation? Will they try to make money off this some way, or is it truly altruistic? What counts as a "legitimate" project? Lot's of questions, but potentially a cool little App to help folks bootstrap something small or contribute more money to a cause than you and your social network (coordinating voting) might be able to give out of pocket.

Worth checking out. I just voted for the Youth Policy Action Network.