Online Fundraising and Cash Flow: How an Early and Often Overlooked Decision Costs Your Campaign During Crunch Time

We’re less than 10 days out from Election Day. You’ve spent the entire election cycle building your online donor file and your hard work is finally starting to pay dividends. You’ll probably raise more online between now and Election Day than you’ve raised during any other time period this year, but depending on who is processing your credit card donations, you probably won’t see that money hit your bank account until days after polls have closed. THAT’S A PROBLEM!Look back to the early stages of the campaign. You’re getting your candidates website set up and it’s time to choose an online credit card processor. For one reason or another, you decide to use an online processor that aggregates, like Piryx, Transaxt, Raise the Money, Anedot, and others. Maybe you went with what you’ve used in the past or maybe the cheapest vendor. It’s possible you just farmed that decision out to a staffer or consultant.Back to the present. You’ve raised enough money online in the last few days to fund a last minute ad buy, but you need the cash to pay upfront because very few media or mail vendors, if any, are going to take an IOU from a political campaign- that’s a quick way to get burned. The truth of the matter is that it takes an aggregator like Piryx up to 10 days to transfer that money into your bank account. Every day that money is in transit is a day you can’t make a last minute media buy or mailing. TV time eventually sells out and at some point it’s too late to drop a mail piece. It’s like the money was never raised in the first place.It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead of using an aggregator, you could have used an online processor that allows you to set up a merchant account, like WidgetMakr. If you used WidgetMakr for your online fundraising, you would see that money within one to three days (in-line with the media buy and/or mailing timeframe). Now you can dictate how that money gets spent, get your message to your voters, and ultimately get your candidate over the finish line instead of being forced to use your last minute credit card donations for residual expenses after Election Day.While it may be too late to switch now, it’s likely you’ll be faced with a similar decision again. Choose WidgetMakr and set your campaign up for success.