The 7 Campaign Tasks You Should Do In August

August can be a pretty slow month in the life of campaigns.  Since there isn’t an election lurking around the corner, there typically isn’t as much fundraising going on, the press isn’t constantly breathing down your neck, and the candidate doesn’t have to be in seven places at once.  This can be a great time to clean up your database so that when the campaign becomes full swing again, you are ready to go.  Here’s a few ideas on how to spend some of your free time now, or some projects for those ambitious college interns who will be returning to school in a few weeks:1. Spend some time cleaning up your unitemized donors.  During the campaign, we often overlook these donors’ records because they cannot be scrutinized by the press.2. Check for duplicates.  You may find some donors who contributed several times with different addresses.  Crimson users can simply run the “Dupe Checker” report to identify the records that are most likely duplicates.3. Scrub all of your data.  Pull an Excel file of all of your donors.  Go through them to make sure there are no obvious spelling errors.  This can be a very tedious task, but it is invaluable to not be sending solicitation mailings with blatant spelling errors next year.  Those are a waste of time and money.4. Did you use flags or keywords to track which organizations supporters belong to?  If so, start analyzing that now.  Maybe you didn’t realize that a lot of members of specific organizations gave to your campaign.  This could be a great way for to reach out to new potential donors if you know which organizations have people who tend to give you money.  If you didn’t keep track of your supporters’ affiliations, now is a great time to reach out to local organizations who are willing to give you their membership list so you can go through and append them to your supporter database.5. Fill in the fields that aren’t required for your FEC reports.   August is a great time for pure prospecting research. This includes salutation and spouse name.  The more information you have about a prospect or a donor, the better quality your database will be.6. Link donors’ Facebook pages and Twitter handles. Reach your supporters where they are spending their time. Social links can be invaluable.7. Make sure you have a record in your database for everyone who has liked, shared, commented on, or retweeted anything from your previous campaign(s).  This is a great resource of supporters who would be more likely to donate or put in some volunteer hours.There will undoubtedly be many problems that will arise once election season is upon us again.  There is no way of predicting what will happen in the next year, but you can be one step ahead by at least starting out with a clean database.  No one enjoys doing these tasks, but it could save you from having many headaches in the future!