It might be the season of holiday parties, “slow to respond” out-of-office messages and long-overdue vacations, but that doesn’t mean you should put your email fundraising program on hiatus.
In fact, keeping an active content calendar featuring not just fundraising asks but traditional newsletters or even holiday greetings is the best thing you can do to keep your supporters engaged, according to Damian Arias, the new president of prospecting at Frontline Strategies.
“I would say that you have to keep your email list warm,” Arias, who started out as a copywriter at the NRCC in 2015, told C&E. “”The people who are successful, they constantly engage with the list and make sure that they are being active so when those moments do occur, you can send to a large audience who’s fully engaged.”
Many Republican practitioners have noted post-2024 how outgunned they were by their Democratic competitors. Others have highlighted issues with fundraising infrastructure (namely a lack of competition) that they believe could be holding their side back in the dollars race.
But Arias believes that much of the fundraising imbalance was down to Democrats being the incumbent party in the Senate and White House. That’s not to say he doesn’t see places where Republicans can improve.
“I would say it’s a lot more branding [that’s the] issue with a lot of the down-ballot Republicans,” he said. “President Trump is the king of small dollar fund fundraising. He has a 100-percent name ID, even with non-political people — everyone knows the name Trump.”
Down-ballot Republicans, meanwhile, struggle “to break through all the noise that is out in the digital atmosphere, and just the immediate atmosphere at large.”
He’s recommending clients focus on brand building going into 2025. “You see the people who are successful at digital fundraising, they have a huge brand,” he said.
Going forward, “the only challenge … will be [developing] your own personal brand … making sure … that people trust you to give you money.”
