[Lnc-business] Frequency of fundraising pitches

[Daniel Wiener]

At the last LNC meeting we had some discussion about how often to send out
fundraising mailings.  Wes Benedict had been receiving pressure to reduce
the frequency, based on complaints from a few individuals.  But I and
several other LNC members expressed ourselves emphatically that those
individuals should be ignored: The number of letters should be increased,
as long as they remained profitable.  Accordingly, the 2015 budget was
amended to authorize 9 instead of 6 major house letters.  Those would be
supplemented by occasional email fundraising pitches.

I therefore found today's Politico article of interest (*Activists bristle
at Hillary Clinton fundraising pleas -- Constant solicitations for cash in
the absence of an actual candidate aren’t sitting well
<http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/activists-hillary-clinton-fundraising-pleas-115199.html>*),
especially the following paragraphs:


*As frequently as Ready for Hillary sends its solicitations — recipients
say they arrive daily — experts say barraging inboxes has become the new
norm.*

*“The best practice used to be that you would only send a couple per day at
max,” said Michael Whitney, an email campaigning specialist at the
progressive communications firm Revolution Messaging. But in recent years,
he said, email campaigners have become more aggressive without registering
any meaningful backlash.*

*The new consensus is that constant emailing “might annoy a lot of people,
but it doesn’t mean they’re going to unsubscribe and it doesn’t mean
they’re not going to donate in the future.”*

*“Three years ago, the idea of sending more than two emails a day was
considered abusive,” he added. “That’s gone out the window.”*


Now obviously Hillary is at the extreme other end of the fundraising
spectrum, and it's not something we want to emulate.  The article indicates
that the super-saturation of solicitations is finally taking its toll on
her potential contributors.

But two-a-day used to be the "best practice"?  And more than that is no
longer considered abusive?  Really?

Between what the LP is presently doing, and what the Hillary campaign is
overdoing, there's an enormous gulf.  It seems like there's ample room for
us to increase the frequency of our fundraising emailings and snail
mailings without getting anywhere near to the level which would turn out to
be counterproductive.

Dan Wiener

P.S.  I'm apparently on Rand Paul's email list (not that I've ever
contributed to him) and his RandPAC sends out a fundraiser pitch an average
of once a day.  (Sometimes it's twice a day, sometimes they'll skip a day.)
 I have to assume that it's working or they wouldn't be doing it.


-- 
*"In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we
guess it (audience laughter), no, don’t laugh, that’s the truth. Then we
compute the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this is right, if
this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare
the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or
experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works. If it
disagrees with experiment, it’s WRONG. In that simple statement is the key
to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it
doesn’t matter how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is.
If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”*
-- Richard Feynman (https://tinyurl.com/lozjjps)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://hq.lp.org/pipermail/lnc-business/attachments/20150214/e544bac0/attachment-0001.html>