The Diminishing Returns of Fundraising Spam

Everyone hates spammy fundraising texts. Literally everyone. So, why is it such a dominant fundraising method?

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Well, let’s back up a little bit. Every says they hate spammy texts, but even very rich fundraisers have limited resources and they would not necessarily persist in a technique that wasn’t at least a little bit revenue-positive. Some people are fine with spam texts, or at least, they are possibly not annoyed enough by them to consider blocking future texts. So, what gives?

This is one of those weird areas where I have some expertise, not really because of my academic training (though I do think being an expert in public relations gives me the tools to evaluate how an organizational behavior might be changing its relationship with various publics), but because I spent my 30s working in non-profits where I had to design outreach strategies and sometimes run donor campaigns. I did not enjoy this latter set of work, because I have always found fundraising awkward, but my ethos here is both professional and personal.

The SMS fundraising campaign has its origins at the end of the 2000s, when the Red Cross piloted a successful programto ask people to donate small amounts via texts that add the donation amount to their monthly phone bills. Asking people to donate $5 raised nearly $200,000 for hurricane relief. It had such a large conversion rate (the rate at which people contacted for donations actually donate, in this case well over the average nonprofit donation webpage of 17%) that it quickly became the model for all types of fundraising, most famously in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. This has generally held true ever since: for service-providing nonprofits, text-based donations are, by far, the highest impact resource spend for fundraising.

Political campaigns noticed. Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign used fundraising texts to both solicit contributions and to maintain active relationships with donors, providing a rapid method of message delivery that side-stepped media gatekeepers and create parasocial relationships. It is hard to overstate how effective this was in terms of both supercharging the donation process, so of course as the 2010s continued, this modality came to dominate the political fundraising scene.

To be clear, I think nonprofits were well on their way to this threshold, but the derecho of political texts during 2016 and ever since just accelerated this process: people have an upper limit for how many solicitations they want to see in a given timeframe before they just shut down. A general rule of thumb is, people need three “cultivations,” or non-donation interactions, for every donation message they receive before they start to tune out or, worse, block future requests. Once someone feels saturated with donation requests, they start to ignore all donation asks, even if they might have otherwise been likely to donate. Donor fatigue is a real phenomenon, grounded in our desire to not be hounded for things that may not have clear relevance without higher-touch communication.

Needless to say, the Democrats have a massive donor fatigue problem.

So, there is an obvious trend at work: the Democrats send far too many messages, and people are starting to opt out of future donation messages, and overall the conversion rate for text-based fundraising is in decline. I think we see so many texts in spite of declining effectiveness because there is a metrics mismatch. Donation texts have an astronomical open rate (which is recorded with you open a message on your phone), something like 80%. It may not matter that the conversion rate is somewhere around 1% now, compared with the 80% text conversion rate 15 years ago. The scale at which texts are sent now benefits from spam logic—that is, the price of sending them is relatively low, so you can send a lot of messages, and the ever-shrinking conversion rate still comes out ahead.

I don’t want to oversell this. Text message fundraising is still effective, and a lot of non-profits benefit from using it. These messages can be a good way to maintain personalized touch points with audiences, which has been validated through research to net higher donation rates and amounts.

The thing is, you have to do the relationship building around the texts to make the donations work — and all of that has to be done in a way that respects donors as busy people with limited time, money, and distraction capacities. The Democrats’ use of text messaging fails every one of these dimensions: they are too numerous (during campaign season, despite reporting them as spam, I get 5 or more each day despite never once clicking on them), they ask for far too much with no relationship building (“give me $5 to defeat Trump” is neither building a relationship nor is it respecting someone’s bank account when they get that 5x per day even on weekends), and they only add to the sense of overwhelm we all feel when we don’t tightly restraint phone notifications.

In other words, Democrats are coasting on inertia with their text message fundraising. It is similar to their reliance on X as a social platforms: sure, they might seen some journalists amplifying a message or two, but ultimately they are posting to a low value platform with minimal click-through (only Pinterest is lower) and extreme brand risk. It’s weird. They need to shift track.

There are a lot of cost-effective ways of improving relationship management without demoralizing someone with a blizzard of gimme-messages: newsletters are also high volume, but they are easier to manage and people are more receptive to them. Newsletters also have the benefit of side-stepping the flood of algorithmic and generated noise that social platforms now place in between organizations and their audiences. In-person effects are much more resource-intensive, but especially for younger people they can balance out the flood of text messages. Message diversity can help as well: sharing updates on policy initiatives, offering rallying or support, and giving people a break from the flood of hands-out begging can do wonders for addressing a cratered reputation.

Ultimately, though, the Democrats’ text messaging problem is downstream of their broader leadership and organizational challenges. I am not naive about how weak political parties are in the US, but senior Democratic leaders with influence and power remain steadfastly oppositional to the growing progressive grassroots movement that offers them any hope of ever regaining political power. Senators still brag about how they’re friends with virulent ideologues who openly wish them dead, while Representatives sneer at progressives trying to rally opposition to the secret police while the consultants advising them beg them to throw minorities to the wolves. This is not all Democrats, to be clear: it is a sliver of senior, influential long-termers doing this — a lot of lower-rank Democrats are angry and trying to fix this. It’s a battle, but ultimately the party — and its potential for beginning the healing progress from Trumpism — is being strangled by an old guard that just refuses to modernize. It’s frustrating.

So, let’s take the fundraising messages as a bellwether. If the mainstream of the party ever wakes up to the harm they’ve done to the brand reputation, if they ever crack open the door to shifting track toward actually addressing the challenges we face instead of grinding down an ever-shrinking donor base to run bizarre word salad campaigns, we will probably see it first in how they change those inescapable text messages. I don’t know whether to be optimistic about this or not. Do you?