The swag they carried

As a Democrat, I’m not terribly writing the “Why we won” posts after an election. That said, it hasn’t even been a week, but a casual browser of the internet can already find more than 300,000 posts about how Barack Obama was elected the forty-fourth President of the United States. This blog isn’t about electoral politics, but rather the use of technology for non-profits, so I’m going to focus on a very small part of the Obama electoral machine and the lessons non-profits can take away: merchandise.

Many non-profit fundraisers cringe at the thought of premiums and merch. “If you get your supports hooked on premiums, they won’t donate without them” is the conventional wisdom, and there’s certainly some truth to it. Merchandise, on the other hand, requires significant outlays to produce and may just sit around your fulfillment house for months (or longer).

Barack Obama’s campaign didn’t see either of these as a barrier. Part of that was due to the volume his campaign could expect – it’s no problem to get a hundred thousand union-made, environmentally-friendly T-shirts made when you’ve got three million donors and sixty-five million (and counting!) voters. That basically puts his supporter base in a tier that few non-profits can match – add in about a million percent name recognition and you’re seeing a consumer base closer to that of Apple or Nike.

Adding to this is the strong brand identity that Obama established – not only with the distinctive logo, but with the general energy of his campaign that made people want to be a part of it – it was cool to be an Obama supporter and show it off in a way that just wasn’t the case with Gore or Kerry, and certainly not with McCain or W. My colleague Eve is going to chime in later this week with a post about the Obama brand, but it seemed to be a big part of what made Obama gear more than just an obligation and into an important part of their fundraising arm.

So what lessons can non-profits take from the Obama campaign if they aren’t as big or cool as Obama? Four do’s and one big don’t, and how your non-profit can learn from their example, below the fold…

The first is judicious use of premiums. I was a relatively consistent donor to Barack’s campaign during the primaries (fueled in part by their clever strategy of announcing their fundraising haul after winning or losing primaries, creating dozens more “reporting deadlines” than most campaigns can use), but by the summer, had started to slow down. In June, though, I got a message asking me to make a donation to the campaign and offering me one of a brand new line of “Environmentalists for Obama” organic cotton T-shirt. The novelty of this piece of swag was enough to get me to pull out my credit card and make a gift. Non-profits should take this as a lesson: don’t just remind people that you have existing stuff to sell, roll out new gear to your email list as a premium before adding it what doesn’t sell right away to the store.

Second, toward the end of the campaign, when the barrage of email was getting a little beyond ridiculous, as Obama, the DNC, and MoveOn competed for who could send me the most email in a week, the Obama camp rolled out some conditional content gifts as a premium ask. I didn’t actually realize that these were conditionally selected until one of my officemates mentioned seeing an offer for a T-shirt, and I remarked that I had the exact same email, but offering me a car magnet. We asked around the office and got a mix of the two premiums – everyone on the list got one of the offers, so we didn’t think it was a test (unless something has gone horribly wrong with the random sample generator), but based on geography and giving history, all we could figure out was that they may have made the assumption that they shouldn’t offer car magnets to people who live in DC and are less likely to drive.

Unless someone from Obama’s internet team steps forward with an explanation of the segments, we may never know, but the lesson here is that all premiums are not created equally. People with a reliable giving history should always be upsold to the next level, otherwise you’re in essence losing money because you’re getting the same gift you would have anyway, but having to pay to create and ship them some swag. Similarly, people who don’t own cars might not want magnets, people living in New Hampshire might enjoy a sweatshirt more than those in Texas, and I promise to donate to the first NPO who offers a branded ice scraper to their Wisconsin list.

The third takeaway I’d like to talk about is the most nebulous, but here it is: there’s something to be said about being cool. If your gear is just fairly standard fare with your logo on it, it’s not as likely to get somewhere as something that will attract some attention. I’ve got a closet full of old political T-shirts I never wear, but my Feingold “Backbone” shirt still makes it into my regular rotation, because it gets attention. Similarly, Obama has some gear that’s just cool to wear – unfortunately, most of the store is offline now that the election is over, so I can’t find pictures.

Fourth, the Obama emails frequently advertised gear as being “Limited!” “First Edition!” “Exclusive!” “Super Exclamatory!” In doing so, they created a greater sense of urgency – this wasn’t just another car magnet, it was a first edition car magnet! And when you’re running as an historic candidate, I don’t see anything wrong with suggesting that people ought to pick up a piece of history (and help make history with a contribution in the process). Non-profits can make similar use of this tactic – even if you’re only planning one run, there’s nothing wrong with calling it “First Edition.”

The last thing I’d like to highlight is a lesson from one thing that the Obama campaign did wrong: make sure you ship your items promptly. The Obama campaign’s record on this is not good: they generally promise six to eight weeks, which is great if you’re a rebate you hope people will forget about, but not so much if you’re a campaign that wants repeat donors. After it took about two months to get my “Environmentalists for Obama” shirt, I was much more wary about buying gear just before the election, knowing that there was pretty much no chance it would get there before November 4. While I’m assuming they used a fulfillment house rather than campaign staff to ship items, and that every dollar that goes into faster shipping is one that’s not used on the air, they probably could have balanced this better.

While it may not have won them the election, or even any given state, the Obama campaign’s effective use of merch was a key part of their fundraising juggernaut. Hopefully we’ll see this same effective strategy out of more non-profits in the coming months. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to purchase my “Victory” T-Shirt.

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