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The once-mighty Liberal party has raised less money from fewer donors so far this year than the NDP, traditionally the poor sister of Canadian politics.

According to quarterly financial returns posted by Elections Canada, fewer than 35,000 donors contributed a total of $3.6 million to the Liberal party from January to September this year.

Over the same period, the Conservatives vacuumed up almost $15 million from more than 125,000 individuals.

Even the NDP did better than the Liberals, raking in $3.7 million from almost 44,000 contributors.

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Both the NDP and the Liberals need to see if they can learn something from the success of the Obama fund-raising machine south of the border, which has raised massive sums from large numbers of small donors.

ETA - The Cons have the largest number of donors (125,000) and also the largest average contribution per donor - $120. The Liberals average $103 per donor from a base of 35,000 contributors, and the NDP averages $84 per donor from a base of 44,000 contributors. This does cast some further light on how the Tories have built such a huge advantage.

[ 02 November 2008: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

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Originally posted by TCD:
As with the election, the NDP's best matches the Liberal party's "awful" and we're happy.

Dippers should be more interested in what the Cons are doing right.

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That said, anyone notice the Star today? The spin changed over night...

First head line: Cash-strapped Liberals behind NDP in fundraising
Joan Bryden Nov. 01, 2008

Now: Liberals trail even NDP in fundraising
Joan Bryden Nov. 02, 2008

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Originally posted by Lost in Bruce County:
... My hunch is that the NDP needs to have more contact with membership besides the annual phone call requesting a donation. I believe NDP could do a better job of engaging it's membership in a dynamic and participatory relationship. ...

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Well, I agree that the NDP needs to engage its members in policy discussions more often. That is good for party building.

Its simple: ask more people, you get more. Though the execution of asking more people is anything but simple.

The Obama campaign leapfrogged beyond asking more people [to what, or how, I do not know]. But before they leaped, the organizational base was probably laid in how to ask more people.

The federal NDP is slowly getting better at asking more people rather than depending entirely on hitting up the same old crowd again and again.

The Liberals apparently have not even figured out how to ask the same olds. Let alone the impact of all the Liberals other problems- even before the roiling financial crises it was not a good time for any organization to be starting from scratch to learn how to fundraise from small donors.

[And those Liberal fundraising figures are and will be overstated by inclusion of the 2006 and 2009 leadership campaigns.]

[ 02 November 2008: Message edited by: KenS ]

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Originally posted by Lost in Bruce County:
My hunch is that the NDP needs to have more contact with membership besides the annual phone call requesting a donation.

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But, to answer the question about how to raise more money, the Tories have shown everyone the way. They actually ask people for money.

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I once, at the behest of a friend, joined the local federal PC riding association, in order to help them fend off takeover by the Reform/Alliance. (I guess I wasn't much help.)

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Ok, how did the riding association of Chambly-Borduas have $185,000 to send to the LPoC?

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Thats certainly an interesting outlier.

Maybe years back they had some property given to them?

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Originally posted by Mojoroad1:
Here's one suggestion, (and I could never figure out why it hasn't been done unless there's a legal reason)..... Why the hell doesn't the NDP accept direct deposit (e-money transfers) on the main web site? Or every candidate/riding site for that matter? All Canadian banks can do it, and it costs the donor a buck. For the great unwashed without credit cards, it might be a much bigger incentive.

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Like Obamba; at the Burnaby Douglas NDP we will take your money quickly and easily .

Edited to Add: I will have to look into the idea of e-money. It all depends on how much it costs. With Visa the person donating doesn't pay anything to donate but the recipient does.

[ 03 November 2008: Message edited by: kropotkin1951 ]

[ 04 November 2008: Message edited by: Mojoroad1 ]

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
at the Burnaby Douglas NDP we will take your money quickly and easily . [/URL] [ 03 November 2008: Message edited by: kropotkin1951 ]

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It's ture, Burnaby Douglas is one of the most organized NDP riding associations I've seen. But I would argue that is largely due to your fantastic and committed volunteers. Your treasurer is in the office on a weekly bases. Most ridings don't have that kind of volunteer base - especially in rural Ontario.

Fund raising with the NDP is about having a good strategy - such as KenS and Robo's suggestions - but also having a committed volunteer base to do the work. And I would add a volunteer base that is also TRAINED in the skills of raising money and giving the sales pitch for monthly automated donations.

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Originally posted by Lost in Bruce County:
Robbie_dee has a point - we need a better mechanism to receive small donations from multiple people. My hunch is that the NDP needs to have more contact with membership besides the annual phone call requesting a donation. I believe NDP could do a better job of engaging it's membership in a dynamic and participatory relationship. I also think if NDP wants to grow it needs to run education campaigns. For starters, why strategic voting is not strategic. Call me a Paulo Freire die hard, but I personally believe that NDP's edge is in education and lubricatedintricate communication networks flowing two-ways between membership and head office.

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I regularly receive requests for donations from the NDP. In fact, I think if anything, the party is in danger of doing this too much.

As the Obama campaign illustrated, the trick is not to hound the usual financial supporters, but to expand the base of the financial supporters. There's no technical secret behind that, the model is there for all to see.

The tricky bit-- which is what the Liberals have no doubt run into-- is that people have to have a reason to click on a website and send someone ten bucks.

Not all factors that lead to this are in control of the party or candidate. Certainly, Obama didn't engineer liberal economics since Reagan, or the two term Presidency of The Worst President Ever.

But he and his team were certainly ready to capitalize on all that.

The Liberals have no ideology to fall back on where they can electrify a following. If they move right with the next leader, then Harper will be able to say "vote for me I'm the real right McCoy". And if the Liberals opt left-- well, they won't allow themselves to, no matter how much sense it makes.

People point to Justin Trudeau as some kind of cellebrity savior. I'm not convinced. I think the name Trudeau will electrify the base-- of the Conservative party, to whom the name is said much like the "Church Lady" from the old "Saturday Night Live" said "SATAN" . And he'll be equally damned by many who don't see his father in him.

I could be wrong. We'll probably see at some time.

Mind you, the only advantage the Liberals have at the moment is an NDP who, from the limited vantage point of this key board, seem as unready to capitalize on the public imagination.

The Conservatives aren't relying on a small group of large donors, they're hitting up a large group of small donors. So how do you build a large base of people to ask?

- You build lists of people and keep them on a computer. The Conservatives have built up sophisticated databases of potential supporters and donors. I think the NDP's got the same.

- You add relevant data to those lists. Reading Tom Flanagan's books you see that the Tories are obsessed with not just finding potential supporters but finding out what motivates them. Motivates them to vote. Motivates them to give.

- Target mailings based on that data. Harper didn't put anything about the CBC in his platform but a he kicked the snot out of the CBC in a fundraising appeal. I'm sure he had some data that indicated that the people who got that letter hated the CBC. In the same way, the NDP takes wonky weird positions all of the time that only impress a small number of devoted partisans. Those people should be hit up for cash. People who care about net neutrality should get an email asking them to give and help the NDP fight for net neutrality.

- Incoroporate fundraising and list building into everything you do. Putting up a website? Put the fundraising appeal up front. Canvassing your neighborhood for support and sign locations? Ask for money too. Someone contacts the campaign mad about property taxes? Add them to your list of potential donors.

- Get info for lists wherever you can. I know some people here think it's unscrupulous to hit up people for money unless they've asked to be hit up for money. I don't agree. If people don't want to give they can bin the letter. If we want to catch a lot of fish we need a bigger pond.

- Go for sustaining donations. The NDP's all over this already but pre-authorized sustaining donations are so much less energy intensive then one-time giving.

These may be self-evident ideas that are already in place (in which case we should keep doing what we're doing) but I'm not sure the NDP's put fundraising as centrally into their operations as they could - or even as much as the Conservatives have.

[ 04 November 2008: Message edited by: 1948 ]

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Originally posted by Mojoroad1:
Again, the problem is Credit Cards. E-money transfers are done by email.
[ 04 November 2008: Message edited by: Mojoroad1 ]

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- You build lists of people and keep them on a computer. The Conservatives have built up sophisticated databases of potential supporters and donors. I think the NDP's got the same.

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The NDP's been doing that since before computers-- or at least personal computers.

Ideally, you would want to move people up your lists. Your first list might be people who have responded to a mail out, or appeared as "check marks" on a canvassing list, but didn't take a lawn sign. Your lawn sign list is the one you might want to call from when doing membership drives, and you want to be taking your membership list and working it for donations from time to time. Or all the time.

I'm not sure this is the current model. It's how it was done years ago.

This positioned the NDP to do okay when the party finance laws were changed. We were already doing what needs to be done. The Conservatives transitioned superbly because they had an electified base-- and they'll be able to coast on that okay even in times when, inevitably, Conservatives will be unpopular.

The new dynamic that the Obama campaign-- and its forerunner, the Jesse Ventura campaign in Minnesota, was to glean the people not on lists for both votes and donations.

This is the death knell for the Liberals, because many of those people who are not on lists, were turned off by "bait and switch" politics that is the hall mark of the Liberal Party.

Of course, in politics anything is possible. But for the Liberals to rebrand themselves they need tons of money they don't have to outspend the Conservatives who will be branding them with a limitless war chest.

[ 04 November 2008: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

And given the size of the Conservative advantage, and that unlike the US there are limits to spending during election campaigns, we may well see advertising became a bigger part of the permanent campaign than it is even in the US.

But you can bet the Cons have little war rooms figuring out how to best use that renewing cash advantage. And those best uses may not include any more between elections advertising.

[ 04 November 2008: Message edited by: KenS ]

It's a hand the Conservatives could over play though. The Dion attack adds were a little sophmoric. It would be easy for such things to go overboard, and we all know the Conservative talent for going overboard.

The second time around, a more subtle approach will be needed.

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Originally posted by Obama:
The problem for the NDP with regards to raising money is that people who vote NDP tend to not have much. People who are poor, old age, welfare people, pandhandlers, squeegee kids or starving artists looking for handouts tend to vote for us, so it's hard raising money, man.

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Originally posted by Lost in Bruce County:

It's ture, Burnaby Douglas is one of the most organized NDP riding associations I've seen. But I would argue that is largely due to your fantastic and committed volunteers. Your treasurer is in the office on a weekly bases. Most ridings don't have that kind of volunteer base - especially in rural Ontario.

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ETA: That was truly coffee spitting out of my nose!

[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Mojoroad1 ]

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The problem for the NDP with regards to raising money is that people who vote NDP tend to not have much. People who are poor, old age, welfare people, pandhandlers, squeegee kids or starving artists looking for handouts tend to vote for us, so it's hard raising money, man.

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Originally posted by wage zombie:
[QB]Remember all the arguing at the lest federal convention? The squeegee kid caucus and the panhandler caucus will never see eye to eye.

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Originally posted by bigcitygal:
Okay, you got me. I just wanted to ban him so I could post that I banned him, and revel in the post-modern irony of it all.

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Originally posted by Obama:
People who are poor, old age, welfare people, pandhandlers, squeegee kids or starving artists looking for handouts tend to vote for us, so it's hard raising money, man.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
I think Obama is right about who tends to vote NDP. Our party receives a lot of small donations from people on low incomes and who probably can't afford to give much at all. Clearly these small donations to the NDP came from ordinary people far more generous than the big banksters and multinational corporations which for decades hedged their bets by donating equally to the two big business parties.

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Originally posted by V. Jara:

The Tories still have three times the NDP's donors with only twice the support. In other words, the Tories are 1.5x more efficient than the NDP at reaching donors.

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They're probably wealthier, too.

According to the source in the opening post,
Conservative Party received $15 million dollars from over 125,000 donors, an average of $120 per individual donor

Liberal Party received $3.6 million from fewer than 35,000 donors, or $100 per donor on average

NDP received 3.7 million from almost 44,000, or $84 dollars per donor on average

Elections Canada should prosecute federal Liberal leadership candidates for violating donation limits through loans to their vanity campaigns

[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by Fidel:

They're probably wealthier, too.

According to the source in the opening post,
Conservative Party received $15 million dollars from over 125,000 donors, an average of $120 per individual donor

Liberal Party received $3.6 million from fewer than 35,000 donors, or $100 per donor on average

NDP received 3.7 million from almost 44,000, or $84 dollars per donor on average

Elections Canada should prosecute federal Liberal leadership candidates for violating donation limits through loans to their vanity campaigns

[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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I think the NDP, with about half the popular support of the Tories, should still be able to pull in half the donor support of the Tories (e.g. 62,500 donors) even if those donors give less money. So to my eyes, the NDP is underperforming in the # of donors category by about 18,500 donors (or 42% of the current fundraising base). The Tories are not some sort of magical fundraising geniuses, but they are doing a much better job than anyone else. At $84/donor an extra 18,500 donors would bring in $1.5 million for the NDP- so we're not talking about chump change. Now that the Obama campaign is finished, there should be some US consultants on the market at a reasonable price and well worth their fee. It doesn't cost a lot of money to start calling around.

[ 07 November 2008: Message edited by: V. Jara ]

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The rules put a limit of $1,100 on contributions, but a person can give that amount to a leadership candidate, as well as to a by-election race, as well as making a yearly donation of the same amount to the party.

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I think there was talk that Elections Canada was going to rule that a forgiven loan was not a donation. Be interesting to know if that's how Iggy Thumbscrews got his debt paid off along with Benedict Rae.

Just wondering.

If however you ask me for $100, $200, $500 or Other amount, if I wish to give less than $100, I have to write the amount in myself, not to mention that, if I can afford it, I will probably feel guilty for not giving more. If I can't afford to, the request will not offend me, I just send a smaller amount.

I remember last year an audacious letter sent to us "from Jack" last year asking us to give a one-time contribution of $500. I was so impressed the party had the guts to ask for this amount that I nearly sent it on the spot. Unfortunately, we could not afford it at that time.

Hello, ya fucking morons, I don't!