Everyone who’s donated money to a Democratic campaign or progressive organization has to deal with the emails. The polite requests for money, the more desperate requests for money, the subject lines that can ask about your Covid vaccine status, imply a candidate is FALLING DANGEROUSLY BEHIND, or even pretend to be associated with a popular figure. The worst of these come from groups or campaigns you’ve never even heard of—that’s the result of a group you’ve donated to selling its list to someone else, leading to a deluge of confusing and usually unwanted emails.
But even emails from groups that you support can sometimes cross the line from solicitation into annoyance. Some organizations disguise fundraising asks behind a subject line engineered to force you to click—they’ll be subject-lined “about that Zoom meeting later today” or, more egregiously, “your COVID test results.” Other email subject lines will imply that a donation will help Democrats accomplish an unrealistic goal, like the email I saw this week explaining how Democrats could prevent Donald Trump from running for president in 2024—but only with your money.
Some Democrats are worried about the proliferation of these tactics. Not just because they’re annoying and corny, but because they could harm the party’s long-term prospects, as donors get sick of being barraged by deceptive messages and check out of the ecosystem. One such worrier is Josh Nelson, the CEO of Civic Shout and co-founder of the Juggernaut Project, two companies that help Democratic campaigns and progressive groups grow their email lists. In particular, Nelson focuses on “opt-in” strategies, which means getting people to agree to receive your group’s email. He doesn’t think that buying lists of emails and sending unsolicited messages is a good idea. For one thing, it’s a bit rude, not to mention a violation of the service agreements with most mass email marketing platforms. For another, he thinks that it will come back to bite the party. To explain why, we talked to Nelson about the right and wrong way to do email solicitations. An edited version of that interview appears below:
I see a lot of organizations sending emails asking me about my vaccine status or saying, fill out this poll now to protect Social Security. What do you think about some of these really aggressive tactics to try to get you to click?
There’s a really broad spectrum of tactics that the campaigns use to try to get people to donate. In all marketing and all fundraising, you need people to click. And so people who write and send these emails always have that top of mind. Falling on the side of the clearly deceptive, you’re hoping that somebody is going to donate to whatever PAC you have, believing that they’re somehow donating to Beto O’Rourke’s campaign or Stacey Abrams’s campaign or something like that. I think that’s problematic and unethical. You mentioned the vaccine status ones—I don’t know if I’ve seen one quite like that. I’ve seen some that definitely go too far, where it’s “your COVID test results.” People think that that’s what’s going to be in that email. And of course, it’s not, it’s somebody asking for money. Those are super problematic.
Some others that have gotten a lot of attention are the fake donation matches, where you say donate by midnight, and there’s a wealthy anonymous donor doing a 500% match. If and when that’s true, which I think it sometimes is for nonprofits, that’s a perfectly legitimate tactic. What often happens on the political side is they just make up a number. Around the time reporters started asking about it, Nancy Pelosi’s campaign stopped lying about donation matches.
The gray area, for me, is probably some of the hyperbole, where it’s: if we don’t raise $100,000 by midnight Republicans are going to take the House. It’s early, but most people would probably bet Republicans are going to take the house whether or not that random PAC or campaign hits their fundraising goal 10 months before the election. So I think some of that stuff is a gray area where you’re just making claims that are probably not true but can’t be proven one way or the other right now.
What are the risks of all these people making these individual decisions to engage in these gray-area practices?
Right now, with so many individual campaigns and PACs sending spam emails and sending emails that are designed to intentionally deceive people, we are sending the wrong message to donors. And we’re giving donors a very bad experience. Say somebody gets out of college, they get a job, they are making enough money to donate for the first time to a political campaign. And they google their local congressperson and they go to their ActBlue page and they donate to them. Maybe they’re lucky, and the consultants and staff running that campaign’s fundraising program and email program are on the up and up, and they just send them a thank you email, start sending them substantive updates about what the congressman is fighting for, that sort of thing. But maybe they’re unlucky, and that email program and fundraising program are run by a consultant who then turns around and sells their email address to a bunch of other campaigns, and they start getting phony emails about their COVID test results. And that individual then has the experience of essentially being punished for trying to participate in the political process by making a small-dollar donation. It creates a disincentive for grassroots donors to donate online. Which fundamentally, could be a huge problem for Democrats and progressives moving forward.
It seems like Democratic organizations and campaigns are not having any trouble raising money right now. The committees are raking in record amounts. How much should people be worried about this?
I think there are a couple factors at play. One is that fundraising, and consumer transactions more broadly, have been moving more and more digital, and less and less offline. And that may be to some extent obscuring the effect of some individual donors dropping out or checking out of the ecosystem. I think that’s one piece of it. Another piece is I think a lot of Democratic campaigns and progressive groups saw a historic surge in fundraising in response to the Trump administration and the threats that it posed to everything we believe in. Some of that continues to this day. It’s been a little easier than in the past to fundraise due to having the ultimate “bad guy” to run against. So I think that has been a rising tide that has lifted all boats on the Democratic and progressive side. I suspect it’s going to be the type of thing where because of those sorts of factors obscuring it, everything’s going to be fine, until it’s not. I think there’s going to be sort of a tipping point—a barrage of unsolicited and deceptive emails in the ‘22 campaign and the ‘24 campaign, and more and more donors will talk amongst themselves. I fear that there’ll be some sort of revolt among donors who say, “No, you know what, we’re tired of being spammed, we’re tired of being lied to, and we don’t want to be part of that anymore.”