One of the common complaints I hear here and elsewhere is that we’re being inundated with spam texts and emails from the party. I found a couple of interesting pieces on this. The first is by a guy named Joshua Foust, who has a background in non-profit fundraising:
[…] [P]eople have an upper limit for how many solicitations they want to see in a given timeframe before they just shut down. A general rule of thumb is, people need three “cultivations,” or non-donation interactions, for every donation message they receive before they start to tune out or, worse, block future requests. Once someone feels saturated with donation requests, they start to ignore all donation asks, even if they might have otherwise been likely to donate. Donor fatigue is a real phenomenon, grounded in our desire to not be hounded for things that may not have clear relevance without higher-touch communication.
[…]
The thing is, you have to do the relationship building around the texts to make the donations work — and all of that has to be done in a way that respects donors as busy people with limited time, money, and distraction capacities. The Democrats’ use of text messaging fails every one of these dimensions: they are too numerous (during campaign season, despite reporting them as spam, I get 5 or more each day despite never once clicking on them), they ask for far too much with no relationship building (“give me $5 to defeat Trump” is neither building a relationship nor is it respecting someone’s bank account when they get that 5x per day even on weekends), and they only add to the sense of overwhelm we all feel when we don’t tightly restraint phone notifications.
The whole thing is worth a read. I’ve experienced this phenomenon myself: Some Democratic fundraising consultant has decided that my wife is a good Democrat who donated money (she didn’t), and they’ve also decided that our old home number, which I ported to a second SIM in my phone, is her number (it isn’t, really). So I get many, many texts a week, to all of which I reply “STOP”. It doesn’t matter, because these texts are coming via 10 digit long codes (10 DLC) which are cheap and easy to get, unlike shortcodes, which are expensive and must be approved by all the carriers. It costs a couple of thousand bucks and takes weeks to get a shortcode. A 10 DLC can be obtained in minutes, and it costs like $1/month and $.05 each to send texts (and that’s off-the-shelf rates, I’m sure bulk deals are cheaper). And you can’t block them — it’s whack-a-mole. Every Democrat who’s texted “my wife” uses a different 10 DLC.
A former Obama staffer who also did digital strategy for Bernie Sanders has a more in-depth discussion of the 10 DLC issue. His prescription is relatively simple: crack down on 10 DLC high-volume text sending; have carriers step up to stop spam texts; have the FCC get real about a Do Not Message list, and put fines behind all of this. I think that would be widely popular legislation, therefore, it will not happen under the current administration.
As Foust pointed out in the first piece I quoted, you really can’t start with a begging text with folks that you don’t have a relationship with. But there’s also an issue with Democrats after you’ve interacted with a campaign. I have one of the earliest gmail addresses for my personal email. It’s my first initial and last name. I’ve found that many people have variations of my gmail address and tend to mistype it. So, I get on some mailing lists. Somebody with a gmail address similar to mine did something positive with Gina Hinojosa’s campaign. (She’s running for governor of Texas.) Just to see what would happen, I didn’t unsubscribe. Here are all the messages I’ve received in the three days prior to 8 PM last night:
That’s more than three a day! Even Hinojosa superfans aren’t going to want to hear from her this often. Foust, the first guy I quoted above, pointed out that newsletters are an alternative that people are far more likely to tolerate. Ms Hinojosa’s campaign might want to think about that.
I really can’t blame Hinojosa’s campaign for going ham with Mailchimp. I once was joshing a marketing guy who I like and respect, and he told me, seriously, that marketers believe that machine-gunning emails until the person is ready to unsubscribe is the right way to market. This is another example of how “best practices” in late-stage capitalism are actually terrible. But just because Target or Amazon thinks that we all need to hear from them on the daily, that’s no excuse to pattern communication after practices that most people, justifiably, hate.
