If your inbox looks anything like mine does this morning, it’s full of emails like this one with subject lines like: “Bad news”, “Last chance”, “This is urgent”, and “This may not seem like a big deal, but it is”. After all, today is the last day of April, and everyone running for office is hustling to hit their fundraising goals. I tend to think those emails are pretty annoying, but the problem is, they work.
I try my level best not to send you anything that I feel is just mindless clickbait or that leans on false urgency—but even so, I can look at the stats on our fundraising spreadsheets and tell you that of the top ten emails we’ve ever sent, six of them were end-of-month emails. Deadlines and goal numbers are a powerful tool for motivating people, and that’s true for more than just these emails.
See, it’s easy to become complacent. They say that if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it’ll jump out. But if you put a frog in a pot of room temperature water, it’ll let you turn up the temperature indefinitely until it boils, as long as you do it slowly enough.
We’ve seen that happen in a lot of our communities over the last few decades: over the last decade-and-a-half of GOP control, they’ve slowly chipped away at funding for education, infrastructure, and lots of other things that our people depend on. They’ve slowly chipped away at the tax rate and our cash reserves. They’ve slowly rolled back voting rights and civil rights.
They’ve turned up the heat on the stove in the hope that we’d just let them boil us. But now that we’re approaching a crisis point, people are waking up. And we’ve got to jump out of the pot before it’s too late.
Today is our April fundraising deadline. It’s not a reporting deadline, just an internal one, but keeping up with our budget milestones is important. If I don’t hit my goal this month, then it doesn’t change what my goal for this quarter is, or what my overall goal for the whole campaign is. If we don’t raise as much as we’d like to in April, I have to raise that much more in May to make up ground, which means spending more time fundraising and less time out campaigning.
And the way that works every month is about the same. We get pretty close, and then a hefty chunk comes in on the final day when I tell people I really need it. We get up against the deadline, the heat jumps up, and we all jump out of the pot before we boil. It’s not my favorite way to do things, but it’s just how people work—and if we want to be able to wake up our state and take the GOP’s hands off the stove, then I’d better hit these goals so we can win come November.
