Modeling Journey

With release of its ambitious fund raising campaign, aimed at pulling in $25 million each year to finance elections, the Liberal Party has started to put its money where its mouth is. The Harper Tory electoral machine cannot be beaten by talk alone; money to grease a modern election campaign is a must.

The Cat has two suggestions for the party on how to raise money by increasing the size of individual donations to the party.

These ideas capitalize on the management truism that it often costs less to get more business from existing customers than to win new customers. This does not mean that the party should not try to increase the number of individual donors; of course it must do so. But a big whack of money can be raised if you can persuade an individual donor to increase the size of his or her donation.

For example, if you can persuade a donor to add $1 to his or her usual $10 monthly donation, you have increased the cash obtained by a whopping ten percent.

These two ideas are based on the enormously successful McDonalds' marketing tactic of asking one simple question after each order (Do you want fries with that?), and on our deep rooted desire to get something for nothing.

The suggestions are:

1. Ask existing donors if they will agree to make a Matching Pledge by ticking off a box which says that they will increase their monthly donations by $1, $2, $5 or some other amount if the party does meet some stated target of increased donations (in a province and/or nationally). Asking this simple question is the equivalent to McDonalds' Do you want fries with that?, and also can be pitched to donors as their choice to reward the party for actually meeting its fund raising targets; and

2. Include a monthly lottery which pays prizes (lots of relatively small ones) to randomly selected winning donors.

And then sit back and watch the money flow in.