Campaign Kickstart

You need a way for supporters to contribute to the campaign.

There are a variety of choices for contributions which all come with their own set of pros and cons. They are:

• Paypal • Actblue • Authorize.net or Verisign • NGP or similar campaign service

But there are several things which you’ll want to consider when setting up a contribution service. Most importantly, you need to collect employer and occupation information for contributions of $200 or more. Actblue does this automatically.

Another thing to consider is that you want to collect as much contributor information as possible, such as an email address (you DO want to thank them for the donation, right?), and you can still collect this info by hosting a form on your website before sending the contributor off to the payment service. The beauty of this setup is your form will pass that info off to the payment processor with hidden fields. Paypal works well with this setup.

The “official” way to process payments is with Authorize.net or Verisign. Again, you can send them off directly to the payment processor, or you can host a secure webpage to collect that information and pass it along to the processor. Since authorize.net doesn’t accept employer and occupation information (one would think they’d have an easy solution for campaigns, but no) you’ll want to store that information locally, and you can use the hidden form fields trick for this.

NGP and other services will take care of all this legwork for you, even letting you embed their form in a frame on your non-secure website. But don’t get the impression that this is ideal—the data gets stored on their server, and you’ll have to manually retrieve it if you’re maintaining your own email list of contributors and supporters. Also, these guys will take a heavy cut in commissions.

Similar to Mail Merge is the desktop mail list manager, like one of these, or macjordomo for the macintosh.

The biggest difference between desktop mailer software and mailmerge is automated list management. Working in conjunction with a special subscription mailbox, such as mailinglist@yoursite.com, subscribe and unsubscribe requests are made by sending an email to that address. You can also import a list of addresses into the list manager. When you run the program on your desktop it checks the mailbox for new subscriptions. When your computer is not connected to the Internet, all the subscription requests will be put on hold until you connect again.

There will also be a second mailbox for the list manager, for email broadcasts. To broadcast an email to your list you send a message to the second mailbox and that message gets reflected out to all of your subscribers.

To broadcast an email to a large group, most people would simply paste all their addresses into the BCC field of the email. While this does work, it’s less-than-optimal, and some SPAM email filters will block an email with too many bcc listings.

I’m not a fan of Windows but it does offer a convenient email solution to broadcast personalized messages, called Mail Merge. To use it, take all your subscriber information and put it in an Excel spreadsheet. Then draft your message in Word, substituting the Excel column names in places where you want to tailor your message, such as Dear [first_name] ...

When you’re ready to send the message, go to Tools -> Letters and Mailings -> Mail Merge.

The rest of the process is fairly self-explanatory, but you can download complete instructions here.