Budget for online fund raising: advertise now or pay later

Finance directors, take note: Internet advertising can be your biggest fund-raiser. A good mix of banner and search advertising placed properly can generate your highest online return on investment.

Overlooked by campaigns as a luxury affordable by only the biggest national races, online advertising is now a highly targetable, viable option in just about any race. In an era of decreased e-mail deliverability because of anti-spam software, online advertising can help generate desirable site traffic and provide an inexpensive--or even profitable--prospecting solution.

Online advertising proved lucrative in our 2004 advertising campaign for the South Dakota Republican Party in its DumpDaschle.com campaign against the former Senate minority leader. By targeting conservative media sites, the state GOP's ads generated a significant return on investment by limiting its message to only the most relevant prospects. Furthermore, its aggressive search engine marketing campaign capitalized on the extremely low cost of these ads to create an incredibly high profit. It was not unusual to find a $2,000 donation on a search ad that cost only 11 cents to purchase.

The South Dakota Republican Party received well more than six figures from new donors just from the DumpDaschle.com campaign, representing nearly three times their investment on what was basically a prospecting promotion. Additionally, the party added nearly 1,600 donor names to their list of supporters and an immeasurable number of new e-mail addresses.

Here is how we did it.

* Aggressive targeting. By flying under the radar on conservative sites and avoiding mainstream media such as CNN.com and WashingtonPost.com, we were able to directly target the most receptive members of the target audience. Click-through rates for the advertising were also well above the industry average of .3 percent, as high as 3.5 percent for some niche media sitewide buys and all the way up to 75 percent for extremely specialized search terms within the Google network.

* Search engine marketing. At rates as low as a dime per ad-click, every campaign can afford this kind of advertising. Since the potential audience only sees the ad if they come looking for your campaign (or information on a related topic), this can be the most motivated audience.

* Message simplicity. The only way national conservatives could affect the vote in South Dakota was to make a donation, and we wanted to position DumpDaschle.com as the primary brand through which they could place. By using a simple, straightforward design, along with stark black-and-white pictures of the senator, we were able to easily convey the single message that potential donors should receive from the ads: Tom Daschle represents extreme liberal special interests and obstructs the Bush agenda and we need your donation now to stop him.

* Promote an action. This is one of the most overlooked aspects of online marketing. The ad should spur a specific action--whether it's donating $50, signing up for the e-mail list, or requesting a yard sign--and the landing page for the ad should emphasize that action specifically. It is about consistency.

While the campaign gave great results to the South Dakota Republican Party, it also established that--for politics--a properly employed online advertising campaign could be profitable for a group or organization below the presidential level.

R. Rebecca Donatelli is the president of Campaign Solutions in Alexandria, Va., and eDonation.com. Steve Roberts is the primary fundraising and advertising strategist for Campaign Solutions.