Franklin Forum Roundup: Obama Campaign Insider Shares Tips

Some other key takeaways from Ehrenwerth's presentation:

1. Significant resources need to be put toward an organization's Web site. Consider adding videos to your site, as well. Videos drove up visitation and revisitation to Obama's site.
2. Employing someone with community-organizing experience who is familiar with doing really grassroots, face-to-face contact with supporters — might be of value to your organization.
3. Diversify fundraising sources.
4. Try to get a small contribution at first. As the Obama campaign proved, this strategy can still result in a large amount of money over time.
5. Work at getting repeat donors. Many donors to the campaign gave small donations, repeatedly.
6. Make sure your Web site is user-friendly, and especially that contributions can be made easily.
7. Employ new media and have staff dedicated to spending time on them. According to Ehrenwerth, the Obama campaign had a new-media director in each state. They created interactive blogs and talked about everything going on for the campaign locally. He said being on Facebook and other social-networking sites is mandatory because the opportunities are endless. These sites aren't just populated by the under-30 demographic, though it's a good place to reach those individuals as well. In five years, he said, it will be unthinkable not to have a presence on social networks — so start now.If your organization lacks the staff — or those with an understanding of how these sites work — to do this, Ehrenwerth recommended seeing if a staff member's son or daughter who might be more familiar with the sites can help you create and maintain a profile for your organization.

Check out this video on the FundRaising Success homepage to see Justin Ehrenwerth talk more about the Obama campaign.