While I still believe that a 1973 technology known as email is a communication tool in need of a serious rethinking (ask anyone who gets more than a 100 non-spam emails a day), email is the current the preferred flavor of communication for lots of folks. Email is an especially powerful fundraising tool when it is an integrated directly with the campaign’s donor management system so it can be powered by user behavoir data.

In the current political fundraising season, 3 of our presidential candidates have our Crimson political fundraising database directly integrated with our email engine partner, ExactTarget and are having great online fundraising successes.

When your email engine is directly integrated with your fundraising contact database, the campaign can generate tens of millions of emails and track response rates using the Crimson platform. As I use to teach back at the RNC campaign college, keep all your data in one place so you can manage the life-cycle of your supporters, from introduction -> to supporter -> to donor -> to fundraiser, and finally -> to VOTER!

Down ticket campaigns can easily replicate the successes of our presidential candidates using Crimson. Just get yourself a pithy copy writer and start experimenting. The nice think about a integrated email/donor manangement system is that the data will show you when you’ve got it right and when you’ve got it wrong. You just need to start experimenting.

One of the interesting political fundraising tidbits is how this cycle compares to the same time last cycle. One thing that I saw a lot of last cycle was that donors were making max-out gifts (the largest donation you can make as designated by the FEC) to numerous campaigns. This cycle, the economy must have put the squeeze on many donors and they are only backing a single candidate… and only after that candidate demonstrates that they are viable.

Its always fun with economics and politics collide. I think we’ll see allot of eco-politics (or is it poli-nomics?) this year.

If using volunteers to fundraise is part of your campaign strategy, Crimson RPM is the key to your success. The processes for RPM have been battle hardened by 4 presidential campaigns and more than 100 federal and local races. RPM gives your team:

• volunteer fundraiser action center,
• centralized fundraising management platform and
• anytime/anywhere donation processing

Crimson RPM’s methodology is based on:

• Empowering your supporters to reach out to their networks with branded tools and materials that are conducive to contributing
• Motivating those supporters to fundraise with incentives and accountability by making fundraising progress easy to understand
• Instilling the practice of driving a lifecycle that consistently converts donors into fundraisers.

Let us help you and your finance team hit your fundraising goals.

WidgetMakr allows campaigns to build unlimited donation form pages and view analytics for those widgets in order to optimize their online fundraising campaign. WidgetMakr’s standard forms are designed to produce high conversion rates, but depending on the type of fundraising your campaign is doing, making a few adjustments could help keep the donations rolling in.  Some users choose to use different widgets for different email marketing, telemarketing, and direct mail campaigns, so that they can test and maximize donations.

Editing the look of your widget can also help it integrate seamlessly into the design of your website.  You can do a lot with WidgetMakr’s Widget Editor.  It allows you to change backgrounds, fonts, field labels, colors, media, and more without writing any code.

For experts who are looking for even more control over the style of their widget, you can use WidgetMakr’s Advanced CSS style editor.  CSS styling allows to your tap into the CSS hooks that are built into your widget and change nearly every stylistic aspect of the widget controlled by CSS.  In this blog post we’ll cover some basic CSS edits.

You don’t have to be able to write your own CSS, but if you want to, you can.

Rounded Corners on your Form Fields

Rounded corners can give your form fields more of cool factor.  Try playing with the smoothness of the corner by adjusting the border radius.

Larger Form Fields

Maybe simply making your form fields larger would make them match your website design better? Thats easy with a little custom CSS.

Remove Header or Message/Media Area

Do you only want the donation form? Don’t want to bother with a header image or message?  Add this CSS code to the Advanced tab on Step 3 of the Widget Creation/Edit Wizard.

NO HEADER:

NO MESSAGE/MEDIA AREA:

Give your Form Fields Inner Shadow

A bit of inner shadow can give your form a professional look.

I’ll post more CSS Tip and Tricks soon.  Let us know of any specific CSS tips you want in the comments and we’ll include it in the next post!

I took a quick look at our Crimson RPM (our political social fundraising/bundling software) dashboard and our “ACTIVE” usage just passed 7,000 users.

This means that 7,217 people (as of 10:21 EST this am) are actively raising money for either the RNC or one of our 5 Republican presidential candidates. That is A LOT of Republicans donating their time and money!

Here is why friends-asking-friends is great for political fundraising:

• friends-asking-friends are 10 times more likely to get a gift over a campaign soliciting a donor directly.
• gifts solicited by a friend are 52% larger than a gift solicited by a campaign.
• pledge-to-donation conversion rates are 40% higher when friends are involved in the donation collection process.

Using your supporters as fundraisers should be a no-think for any campaign. Let us show you how your campaign can raise money like the presidential front runners.

The most important new feature is our Expenditures Module, which includes:

• easy expenditure entry forms
• vendor tracking for credit card disbursement,
• data import with automatic duplicate entry screening,
• political campaign specific “Chart of Accounts”
• Cash-On-Hand reports
• easy integration into FEC report creation

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW!!! (you should really read this part)

Our robust new features require the horsepower behind the latest version of Silverlight (version 5).

If you are trying to log into Crimson after Monday (2/6), and you have the old version of Silverlight, you will be prompted to upgrade to the latest version. You can also download Silverlight 5 and install it yourself by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

Mac Users

Unfortunately, Google has not yet released an update that allows Chrome to support Silverlight 5. Until Google and Microsoft decide to play nice, Mac users should use Safari or Firefox with Silverlight 5 to access Crimson.

We are super excited by this release and please let us know how you find working with our new Expenditure Module.

Sincerely,

CMDI Crimson Release Team

Of the $15 millon raised, $333K of the gifts had FEC compliance issues, such as:

• over-limit contributions,
• missing signatures,
• invalid credit card numbers, and
• contributions from corporations &  other non-permissible entities.

Here is the cool part, CMDI’s FEC compliance tools and professional services boffins were able to retain 83% of all the compliance issue ridden donations.

That means that CMDI saved the campaign a grand total of $276,115 from the mean old McCain Feingold compliance regulations.

How cool is that?

For the rest of 2012, we are providing Crimson incumbent congressional campaigns for FREE. I am not sure life gets much better than that.

Actually, life can get better. We will even help you migrate your donor/supporter data from your current system into Crimson… even if you are just running on spreadsheets.

Get Started!

Some of our competitors have locked their clients into long term contracts by withholding data leading up to FEC filing deadlines. We’d like to provide you with easy, cost effective options so you can try the best political fundraising software available.

Once your free 2012 is up, we will move you to our standard Crimson licensing pricing.

Here are the catches:

1. You are required to use CMDI’s WidgetMakr for your credit card transactions which will incur a 2.5% transaction fee. Note that this shouldn’t be a hardship because WidgetMakr is one of the most flexible donation processing forms available.
2. You are committing to using Crimson through the 2014 election cycle. You can cancel if you don’t succeed in November or should you choose to retire.

We think that once you try Crimson, you will never be able to imagine life without it. Based on the fact that over 55% of Republican donations to federal organizations are managed by CMDI and that we’ve executed over 7,500 FEC filings, we very confident that we will exceed your expectations.

Get Started!

In 2008, the number was pushing more like 20% to 25%… Then came February for candidate Obama. The Obama campaign raised $55 million in February, $45 million, or 82% of it, came from online donations. Those were crazy-huge online donation numbers, shocking all of us.

During the 2010 cycle, of the 125 campaigns I worked with, we saw the better performing candidates with 30% of their donation coming in as online gifts.

My 2012 Online Donation Rate Prediction

I believe that we will see online giving for political campaigns jump to over 45% of all gifts. Once the Republicans have selected a candidate and the Obama team kicks into gear, I think there will be a trickle down affect and campaigns at all levels will begin the retail phase of the political fundraising calendar and maximize the efficiencies of online donation processing.

On top of that, the technology has gotten so much better then even 2010. CMDI’s WidgetMakr allows our campaigns to create an infinite number of uniquely styled donation forms, without the creator having to know a lick of code.

Back in the early 2000s, web developers were charging at least $5,000 for a campaign online donation form. Now much more flexible and secure forms are practically free AND you can set them up for any fundraising event, advertisement, direct mail piece, or individual volunteer fundraisers (bundlers).

With WidgetMakr, and other like minded tools, it is only natural for campaign finance teams to push their donors to customized donation landing pages for all donation processing.

Before I go too far, the most glaring difference is that CMDI’s Crimson is ONLY for Republican campaigns. A number of our esteemed competing platforms work with both Democratic and Republican campaigns.

CMDI’s Crimson campaign management software was born out of working with complex, high volume Republican organizations (presidentials and National Committees). Crimson takes the complicated tasks required to run a national campaign and makes them easy and fast for lots of campaign workers at all levels of an organization, from finance, to political, to the treasurer, and the management team.

All other fundraising and compliance tools began at the other end of the spectrum and started by building a simple system for managing small political campaigns where a very few campaign workers had relatively straight forward needs.

Over the course of the past decade, the world of campaign finance software, FEC reporting, online fundraising, bundling and treasury requirements has become increasingly complex. This has made running a 2012 congressional race almost as complicated as running a presidential campaign 10 years ago in terms of FEC compliance and donor relationship management.

Small congressional districts who use to raise a few hundred thousand from friends and family now need to raise $500K through online fundraising and another million through volunteers and bundlers, all while staying FEC compliant.

CMDI has been able to apply it’s 30 years of national campaign experience to Crimson allowing congressional and state-wide races to have the resources, robust feature sets and confidence that once was only available to presidential candidates.

In addition to CMDI’s vast experience, CMDI’s customer base of national campaigns allows CMDI to operate at the leading edge of political innovations. CMDI takes these innovations & learning and incorporates them back into the Crimson platform so our congressional, senatorial and state-wide campaigns can leverage Republican innovations in almost a real-time basis.

Our competitors and recent startups have taken the tougher road of trying to retrofit the increasingly complex features to a platform that was designed for campaigns of a different age and a different scale.