David Hogg is Spamming Me

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Welcome, new readers and new paid subscribers! Thank you so much for being part of the Epolitics community. I’ve been running Epolitics as a blog and now a Substack for almost twenty years, and I’m excited to welcome you aboard. Digital politics is a radically different animal than it was in 2006, but so many of the same rules still apply. Including some basics that seem to be forgotten all too often, as we shall see below.

David Hogg is Spamming Me

David Hogg is spamming me, but the one he hurts could be himself.

On June 20th, a “Welcome to the Team” message from Hogg’s Leaders We Deserve appeared in my email inbox. Had I signed up for his list? No, I had not. The message itself wasn’t too bad; it was long, but since it was intended as an introduction, I forgave it. Did it ask me for anything but money? No, it did not — it included no attempt to treat me as something other than an ATM with legs. Of course, I assumed more appeals would be coming, and I was not wrong.

I received five more messages from Leaders We Deserve over the remaining ten days of June, for a total of six for the month. Four more have arrived in the first five days of July, making a total of ten unsolicited messages from one organization in just over two weeks. I have given them no money, and I only clicked on a single donate button to see where it went (an ActBlue landing page). Yet the messages continue to pile up.

Now, I have nothing against Hogg and have actually written about him and his Parkland peers as a model for distributed organizing. I also have no problem with his drive to unseat certain Democratic incumbents, since the party needs fresh ideas and no elected official should feel entitled to a seat. I do think Hogg was wrong to push challenges from a position on the Democratic National Committee, but that’s because I believe the party apparatus must remain as neutral as possible to keep its legitimacy.

But I do have a problem with spam, which a stream of unbidden donation appeals clearly is. Leaders We Deserve or its fundraising consultants have obviously purchased or otherwise acquired lists of past Democratic donors, and they have not been shy about using them. I’m sure they’re having some success, since quantity has a quality all its own and even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn. Then why do I object?

Counter-Productive Tactics

When you email a bunch of people out of the blue, even from a name as well known as Hogg’s, some recipients are going to mark the messages as spam. Others will ignore them, particularly after the first two or three, and your open and click rates will usually drop.

Email Service Providers like Gmail, Yahoo, MSN and AOL track overall performance for big senders, and low open and click rates can put your appeals in the “promotions” or “other” tab in recipients’ inboxes. Worse, spam complaints can kill your messages dead! I’ve worked with a client before who’d ended up in “spam jail” with a couple of the big ESPs, and it’s a tough spot to escape. No matter how good your content is, if no one sees it, it may as well not exist. Also note that sending to people who haven’t opted-in to a list generally violates the terms of service for mass-email systems, not that many of them seem to police it.

List-buying is an old practice. One small example: In 2016, Chris Christie endorsed Donald Trump after he dropped out of the presidential race, but Marco Rubio ended up with Christie’s donor list. I recall hearing from a friend who specialized in political email deliverability that Rubio’s open rate dropped significantly after he started sending to Christie’s supporters, as one might expect when spamming a list of people who actively didn’t back him in the first place.

I did check my spam filter to see if any messages from Leaders We Deserve had landed there, and none had so far — a sign at the least that they got their sender settings right. I DID find a recent Republican National Committee email flagged as spam, but I approved it so I can bask in the light of their future missives. The RNC message provides a cautionary tale for Hogg, though, showing that even big political organizations can find themselves in deliverability trouble.

Generic Content

Since I love you all, I went through each of Hogg’s fundraising appeals looking for themes. What I mostly found was bland writing all about Leaders We Deserve, with little to lay out what’s in it for me as a donor. Overall, nothing about them made these messages stand out from the scores of similar emails I get every week.

An early entry in the sequence even employed one of the spammier tactics out there, the “we’ve checked your record and you haven’t donated yet” scam. Really? You checked MY record individually? I’m touched! No, you just ran a database query for people on your list who hadn’t donated yet and tried to guilt them into giving you money. It’s about as bad as the “renew your membership” emails from an organization you’ve never joined (I’m looking at YOU, DLCC). Blech.

I will note that the July 3rd message announced support for a young, progressive candidate in the race for Raul Grivalva’s congressional seat in Arizona, with a donation split between Hogg’s group and the campaign. THAT one gave people a concrete action to take to help someone running for office more than a year before the midterms. It also might tempt donors who might not be excited about giving to Leaders We Deserve but support the goal of building a younger political bench. One email out of nine ain’t bad!

Disrespecting Activists

Spamming people out of the blue, treating them like cash machines and employing cheap, manipulative tactics all suggest one thing: a fundamental disrespect for potential donors and supporters. To Leaders We Deserve, our only apparent value is the contents of our bank accounts, not our ability to contribute time, creativity or passion to a cause. Millions of Americans are primed to act now to help save our democracy. Why not help them find outlets that work for them and still benefit you and your political goals? Some people can donate, yes, but others need options too. Sign a petition! Share content on social media! Recruit a friend! Something that doesn’t require the transfer of funds, and that does require consent.

Despite our rough introduction, I’ll keep watching Leaders We Deserve to see what they’re up to. Heck, I might have joined their list on my own if they hadn’t spammed me first. For now, though, nothing says “we’re an authentic voice changing the political system” like adopting some of the worst practices of the Old Regime.

Better Ways to Build Lists

Instead of investing in spam, Leaders We Deserve could build its list organically. That approach lets potential donors choose to come on board because they want to, not because their names were on a spreadsheet someone ended up with. I covered plenty of good practices in my recent Effective & Ethical List-Building and Online Fundraising 101 trainings, a few of which I’ll summarize below. Note that old-school list-building is often slow — trench warfare rather than blitzkrieg — but lasting relationships take time to build.

• Use an acquired list as a basis for a Facebook Custom Audience. Expand via Lookalike audience if you want to expand the tent. Run acquisition ads on Facebook and Instagram against the audiences. Anyone who comes in through the ads has chosen to follow you, so you can email them with abandon. As people sign up, use the new names to create an expanded Custom Audience and Lookalike to refine your targeting beyond the initial list.
• Run acquisition campaigns in other online channels, including activist communities like Civic Shout, Daily Kos or Care2. When possible, go fishing in ponds that are already well stocked with potential donors.
• Roll out joint actions with allies or partners, in which both of you promote the action and reap the rewards in the form of new names
• Go on YouTube shows, appear on cable news, recruit influencers and reach out to relevant online niches to help spread the word to new audiences. Note: Epolitics is available for bribes! Our small-but-mighty community might just make all the difference your success or failure. Just be sure to have an easy action (such as a petition signature) for readers, viewers and listeners to take.

Watch the full training series for more. The final takeaway? An organization helmed by someone as well known as David Hogg shouldn’t have to scrape the bottom of the tactical barrel to raise money. For now, my dollars are staying in my bank account, not going to his.

– cpd

Photo: by freezelight – Spam wall, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link, via Wikipedia