Hey Indivisibles,

I’m Julia Leonard, Indivisible’s Director of Digital Fundraising, A.K.A. the person who sends you all these emails.

That makes me really popular at parties, as you can imagine.

Usually when I tell somebody what I do, they roll their eyes and I follow up with “sorry.” But here’s the thing: I’m really not sorry. I’d love to be able to raise the millions of dollars we need to fund Indivisible’s tools, research, and programs without sending “annoying” emails, but emails are how we raise almost 50% of our grassroots money, and grassroots money is what allows us to do all the amazing work we do. That’s not something to apologize for.

We’re heading into End of Year, which you probably already know is a huge fundraising period for nonprofits and campaigns alike. And yes, that means I’m going to be sending you a lot of emails (plus all the breaking news emails about impeachment on days like today!). So before the mayhem starts, I want to give you a real, no-holds-barred look into why I’m sending all of these emails and what their impact is.

What this is all funding

I’m sure you know that we’re not raising money just to raise money! We send fundraising emails because we have a massive program to win elections, push forward progressive legislation, and save democracy (no pressure), and that program costs money. In the next couple paragraphs, I’ve outlined a few of our near-term and longer-term priorities and how our fundraising program will support them.

Of course it all starts with winning next year. You can read about our full 2020 plan here but the short version is we’re organizing to hold the House, take back the Senate, and (of course) throw Trump out of the White House. Here’s a look at a couple of our programs and what they cost:

Impeachment

Of course, we’re budgeting to continue the fight on impeachment (wow, what a day today. Check out our social media for our live responses). No matter the outcome of the inquiry, impeachment will weaken Trump, underline the importance of protecting our democratic norms, and at the end of the day, is simply the right thing to do. Right now, we’re running a three-part impeachment program focused on the Senate. It includes:

1. Getting Indivisibles to call their own senators. As always, our first priority is that you take action -- no matter who your senators are, call them and let them know you support a fair and open impeachment trial (seriously, if you haven’t yet, make sure you call FIRST THING tomorrow morning). That work requires organizing staff, call tools, and research for our policy and political teams.
   
   
2. Helping Indivisibles drive even more calls to Senate offices. With HubDialer, our state of the art calling tool, Indivisibles who want to do more can contact friendly progressive voters in target states and connect those people directly to their senators. This is a great way to multiply your impact -- we’re on our way to calling 1.1 MILLION voters, and Indivisibles have already made more than 500,000 calls. We’re spending $145,000 on this.
   
   
3. Running targeted ads to further increase pressure. Our ad campaign is reaching even more voters in key states to really up the ante for our 13 target senators. We’ve already reached almost 3 million people and driven thousands of calls into Senate offices, and our ads will continue to have more impact as they reach more people. So far, we’ve budgeted $286,000 for these ads.

Congressional Endorsements

We're not just focused on impeachment, though. Tomorrow, we’re announcing our first round of Indivisible National endorsements for 2020 -- this program is endorsements of House, Senate, and governorship candidates who local Indivisible groups have lifted up as being worthy of national support. We’re budgeting just under a million dollars for that program, including:

• Massive voter contact campaigns through the mail for some of our key endorsed House, Senate, and governor candidates -- $300,000
  
  
• Producing flyers and other literature for canvassers to use when knocking on doors -- $50,000
  
  
• Engaging directly with media outlets, scheduling tours and press events, and supporting groups doing the work to get candidates the coverage they need. And we’ll place paid buys for things like digital, radio, and print ads -- $400,000
  
  
• Making direct contributions to endorsed candidates to support their campaigns -- $100,000

Weeks of Action

Beyond impeachment and direct electoral work, we’re still doing advocacy! Here’s an example of some of the costs associated with a Week of Action around a particular topic:

💰 Text Messaging: It costs $6,000 to send a text message to our entire SMS list. Text messaging is one of the most effective and fastest ways to ask Indivisibles to take action, but it’s also expensive!

📬 Website Hosting: It costs roughly $1,000 to pay for a month of website hosting. Having a reliable website with minimal downtime is crucial to our work. If you’ve been around a while, you may remember when the traffic to the original Indivisible Guide Google Doc crashed the page -- we never want that to happen again.

️🗺 Event Mapping Tool: Our event mapping tool helps groups and Indivisibles organize and connect with each other (which is crucial when you’re talking about hundreds of events around a topic). It costs roughly $8,000 to keep it up and running for a month.

📬 Emails: Emails (like this one) are the backbone of our advocacy program, as they are for most organizations. We pay a flat fee for access to our mass emailing tool, and it costs $7,656 per month to keep it up and running.

👕 Merchandise: For events like a Week of Action, where visibility is important, we provide merchandise like stickers, buttons, and signs to our groups, free of charge. For one of our weeks this summer, 160 groups requested merchandise, which cost us $12,000.

And we do all that week in and week out, all year round. The numbers get dizzyingly large the more you think about it. And because we’re committed to being fueled by small dollar donations, not mega-donors or shady corporations, that means we have to keep asking you even when it (I admit) gets pretty annoying.

Any one $5 or $25 gift isn’t going to get us there. That’s why we’re so grateful for the tens of thousands of people who’ve stepped up to make grassroots gifts -- because we’re so much more powerful together than apart.

How this year is going

So that’s why we send emails and what they support. The next question I’d ask if I were you is “hey, is it working?” And the answer is -- sort of.

We have, to be honest, missed a couple of fundraising goals in the past few months. Usually, July and August are slow months, and then things pick up in September. But we didn’t see that uptick nearly as much this year. That’s probably because of competition from the presidential campaigns -- hopefully not because people are starting to think of the Trump Era as the new normal. We heard the same from some of our sister organizations, and Blackbaud, a great source of information on non-commercial online data, reported last month that organizations about our size are showing about a 3.6% drop in fall fundraising compared to last year.

All of that means we’re in a slightly tighter place going into the end of the year than we wanted to be.

To be clear: we’re not at risk of shutting our doors or disappearing on January 1. We’ve been lucky enough to have supporters who helped us build up a buffer over the past two years. But we are starting to think about contingency plans: if our fundraising comes in 10% below what we expect, how does that impact our plans for next year, and what do we have to shuffle to reduce the impacts on our programming as much as possible. But I’d much rather be able to go into 2020 saying “wow, our people really stepped up, what else can we do?!”

This is where I ask for money

You know you’re not getting out of this email without an ask.

I’m proud to be doing the work that keeps Indivisible funded so that our organizers, group leaders, and activists can focus on what they do best: activism. And I hope you will be too.

Please, if you can chip in even $10 to fund the movement, support Indivisible Action, and make sure we have the resources to inform, educate, and organize next year and beyond, make your gift right away. Here are some handy one-click links:

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It’s as true of our fundraising as it is of organizing and advocacy: we literally could not do any of this without your help. Indivisible has always been and will always be driven by people -- individual people who’ve shown up, spoken out and helped out. Thanks for being here, on this team, with us.

And thanks in advance for your help investing in the future of this movement.

In solidarity,
Julia Leonard
Director of Digital Fundraising, Indivisible

P.S. -- I’m the one who reads replies to this email address (the good, the bad and the ugly). So if you have questions, please feel free to reply to me! I may not have answers to every question, but I’ll do my best.