E-Mail Tips From the Obama Campaign

Tips about wildly successful fundraising and awareness strategies will continue to be culled from the Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign for months to come.

Right now, here are a few that FundRaising Success contributor Sarah Durham, founder of fundraising consultancy Big Duck, took notice of right away.

1. Collect e-mail addresses. Obama has more than 13 million of them! And keep in touch with these people proactively. Don’t just let them sit idle in a dark, lonely database somewhere.
2. Collect cell phone numbers, too. About a million people signed up for Obama’s text alerts. If you have passionate constituents, tasty pieces of breaking news can be effectively delivered to supporters’ cell phones, and you can leverage these numbers to activate your grassroots support — maybe even with mobile phone fundraising (“text to give”). The Obama campaign even had a handy iPhone application so supporters could be connected to a call center to make a donation at the push of a button.