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With my previous company Democrats.com we have served several hundred campaign clients, raising millions. The campains included John Fetterman, Beto O’Rourke, Josh Shapiro and Stacy Abrams, a dozen House seats as well as more than a dozen down ballot raises for state legislative seats. Our collaborators included more than 20 digital agencies, for whom we offered targeting and e-mail delivery and optimization services. Most of these were based on geography, with just a few candidates at the presidential level having national appeal and a few nationalized Senatorial contests. Other selects included gender and previous evidence of responsiveness such as opens, clickthroughs and donations.

Much of the task with fundraising clients is overambition. They believe that out-of-district donors will find them responsive when donor behavior does not justify it, inflating the costs without increasing the fundraising results.

The current challenge in the expansion of robust fundraising list is not the acquision of new and untested names but increased efficacy and performance with e-mail deliverability. For any your lists you can get the reputation score and test the deliverability results of for campaign clients with GlockApp (glockapps.com) or IsNotSpam (isnotspam.com) or Postmark Spam Checker (spamcheck.postmarkapp.com) or whatever app you trust to reveal a domain’s reputation score. These are not validation services that identify which e-mail addresses are no longer working. Instead, they tell you how many, or how few of your e-mails are actually being delivered.

The major E-mail Service Providers (ESPs) will not deliver the mail to their subscribers unless certain conditions are met, and certain rules are not violated. This is mostly invisible to you. Mail from one of your client’s e-mail lists can be blocked outright by the ESPs without your knowledge. On top of this are server-side spam filters, client-side spam filters and identity challenges that must be completed to be able to send mail to an individual. Many things work against you and block, reroute or delay fundraising e-mail you want to be delivered, opened and acted upon.

However big a problem this is in the commercial and non-profit worlds it is significantly worse in the political sphere. E-mail management and delivery vendors (Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Brevo, etc.) demand that lists be built by individual sign-ups, guaranteeing both permission and the attention of the recipient. In politics list-sharing is widespread in which both permission and attention are violated or lost. The lists we maintain age rapidly and generate low deliverability rates because they are polluted with undeliverable or unresponsive e-mail addresses.

This is a difficult and challenging problem but one that is solvable in a cost-effective way. Your “new” donor e-mails are right there, on your list, but they do not reach their intended recipient. If you maintain a mail server internally for this purpose it was likely built and scaled for an era in which a mailing list of 25,000 names was considered big. Now you have lists in the hundreds of thousands for dozens of candidates and the platform you use for that – in-house or from a vendor — must be re-evaluated. A campaign domain name may have only recently been registered or it may sit mostly unused in odd numbered years with the House or Senate office taking over constituent e-mail. These are very big problems for e-mail delivery for political clients and will not solve themselves.

We propose a free evaluation of deliverability for one to five of your campaign clients in the last cycle. We will analyze each and determine a deliverability score. We ask only for your time and attention afterward to explain the results and our proposed ways of addressing it.

If the deliverability score you get is anything lower than 95% we can solve this problem on your behalf, to the benefit of all of your clients. You could double the percentage of fundraising e-mails delivered and received. In the next election cycle this is how to build a larger and more powerful e-mail lists, as well as to prospect for new list signups.

We can work with any e-mail marketing platform you use. If the evaluation we perform convinces you that you have an urgent problem here is what we would propose a program for repurposing the names that have been blocked by the gateways. This is a huge problem but not an insurmountable one.