920: "Chaotic Fundraising Scramble"
Dan Pfeiffer and case studies for Good Groups
Like most anyone opening a Groups Chat newsletter on a summer Friday afternoon, I love a summer weekend spent reading case studies. So today’s double-dose rec includes a curveball: we’re kicking off with an excerpt from a pre-Substack classic:
Money is a constant topic of conversation among campaign leaders: How much do we need? Where can we find it? Why isn’t there more of it? In tough economic times, these types of questions become more frequent and pressing. Unfortunately, the answers are not readily available. That’s because campaign leaders are much more sophisticated about creating programs than they are about funding their organizations, and philanthropists often struggle to understand the impact (and limitations) of their donations.
There are consequences to this financial fuzziness. When campaigns and funding sources are not well matched, money doesn’t flow to the areas where it will do the greatest good. Too often, the result is that promising programs are cut, curtailed, or never launched. And when dollars become tight, a chaotic fundraising scramble is all the more likely to ensue.
This is not actually about campaigns. It is a 2009 Stanford Social Innovation Review article about nonprofits (with the word “nonprofit” swapped out for an italicized “campaign”) by William Foster, Peter Kim, and Barbara Christiansen.
Re-reading this piece - and a companion guide on finding an organizational fundraising strategy - was inspired by
’s recent post on the inefficiency of the Democratic fundraising ecosystem:
A Pod Save America bro1 is hardly an under-the-radar rec, but his Message Box newsletter stands apart from their usual stuff.
In the piece, Pfeiffer hits three problems with the onslaught of fundraising emails & texts:
Hurting Our Brand (bad for Dems overall, even if good for individual PACs & candidates)
A Missed Opportunity
The Money’s Not Going To The Right Place
Pfeiffer highlights Welcome’s analysis in the third category, but the whole thing on The High Cost of Spam is worth a read.
It closes with a section on what can be done about it, which mostly focuses on Democratic leaders (call out bad actors) and individual donors (be smarter). But those of us working on and supporting groups that try to counteract the inefficient political market would be best served by taking to heart hard-won lessons on nonprofit revenue models.
Democratic candidates who will win over swing voters need support from organizations who can grow to meet the scale of the challenge facing the party. For Good Groups to succeed, it’s not just about raising more. The revenue model must match the program model.
Right now, the Democratic Party’s aggregate revenue model (spam millions of people + seek large one-time contributions from thousands of people) does not match the program model required to win.
Campaign revenue models - raise as much money as possible in as little time as possible - may serve each individual candidate well enough (although they endure a misery to discuss another day). But when you aggregate those incentives, it is the type of annoying disaster/boondoggle that we’ve described as “Tragedy of the Common Texts.”
One of the weirdest parts of our early years for the Welcome team has been how much political people often refer to “the donors” as a single identifiable set of people, instead of a chaotic market of more than ten million Democratic donors last cycle.
We’ve got 920 days until the first presidential primary. Urgency is constant, but discerning and building revenue models that actually fit program models takes time. And inspiration from some summer reading.
Bro is a compliment until Democrats get stop getting blown out among young men