Campaign Kickstart

Data lies at the heart of today’s campaigns. It needs to be collected, imported, sorted, merged, exported, and even encrypted. This is why people spend so much money on campaign services. An excel spreadsheet will get you started, but the bigger the campaign, the bigger and more elaborate a database you’ll need.

Keep in mind that you may have more than one database, such as a database of contributors, one for supporters, and one for registered voters. You could merge these databases or choose to keep them separate.

Separate databases can get messy when it comes time to use that information. For instance, depending on how you’re letting supporters sign up for email newsletters, when it comes time to send an email broadcast you may have to import those addreses into your mailer software. You may also have to add your contributors to that list.

That means your email subscription form should feed the names into your mail list software. The same goes for your contributor data and your field operations data.

The best solutions store information about all your contributors, supporters, volunteers, and voters in one central server, which will allow you to select different combinations when retrieving data. I.e. suppose you want a list of all supporters who haven’t yet contributed to the campaign – if all these tables can be accessed simultaneously you can pull this list up with one try. If those databases are spread out onto 2 or more computers it will be much more challenging.