With both Political and Non-profit campaigns, running an effective digital campaign requires knowledge of a lot of areas to have a good digital presence. Here is a list of the Dos and Don’ts of Digital Campaigns.

Don’t

• Run your email marketing through an @gmail address. Google limits you to 500 messages a day, once reached, you are done for 24 hours. If you need to send out an announcement or call to action, you’re limited to the first 500 supporters in your list.
• Use BCC to send out email campaigns. This limits personalization and with one mistake, suddenly your entire email list may be in the hands of hundreds of other people.
• Use the cheapest Web Host for your site. Running a website requires expertise, and having a slow website or one that has downtime could cost you critical donations. We have had to help so many people when these cheap options fail and the support tickets go on for days while a website is down.
• Use or share username and passwords with your campaign staff.
• Don’t use an insecure website and accept payments or contributions on the site. This is against against Payment Card Industry (PCI) regulation and increases your liability.
• Forget to register a domain name.
• Don’t import an old email list. Every email provider can detect this and will block your emails. This hurts your email repuation. Once it’s gone, it’s hard to recover.

Do

• Find an email marketing provider to use for your campaign, this requires a domain name.
• Use an email hosting provider, so that your campaign can respond using your campaign’s brand/domain.
• Use an SSL certificate to secure your website, this protects anyone’s information when they give a contribution or signup for your email list.
• Find a good hosting provider with good support options.
• Personalize your email messages.

At Campaign Deputy, we provider email marketing, email hosting, web hosting and a SSL certificate all as part of every package we offer. We monitor everything 24×7 which includes email and phone support. Contact us today to learn more!

A Fundraising CRM helps to keep your data organized so that you don’t lose leads, or pledges, while trying to raise the most for your cause.

Pledges

Pledges are the “sales leads” of fundraising with two types, pledge to give, and pledge to raise. Both are critical to fundraising and with our built in pledge tracking, you can keep track of these pledges for both types. Using the build in pledge tracking, you can keep track of the due date, the liklehood of of the pledge, and send email reminders to the person who pledges to your organization. This is a great feature for both political campaigns and non-profits.

Call Time

Everyone gets the same email “Please give X to my Y to help my cause”. Our email inboxes are flooded with these requests. To stand out, call time is the difference. Using our call time manager, there is no more shuffling stacks of paper, you have all the information you need to make a call, connect, take notes, and add pledges all from the same screen. We have some users who spend 4+ hours on just this one page in Campaign Deputy!