Let me tell you a secret that I’ve learned from decades of campaign management and serving as an elected official: Your next campaign victory isn’t hiding in some fancy voter database or expensive consulting firm – it’s probably sitting right in the contacts application of your cell phone.
I can already hear some of you saying, “But Craig, I don’t know enough people to run a campaign!” Trust me, you know more people than you think. Way more. And today, I’m going to show you exactly how to transform your existing contact network into a campaign powerhouse. Believe it or not, building your campaign network is as easy as exporting a few pieces of data that are currently trapped in applications you use every day.
The Hidden Gold Mine in Your Pocket
The phone that you’re probably using to read this post is actually a treasure chest of campaign potential and the is the first step in building your campaign network. Every email you’ve ever sent, every phone call you’ve ever received, every business card you’ve collected, and every LinkedIn connection you’ve made – they’re all valuable assets for your campaign. And all of those contacts are accessible (and downloadable) right from your phone.
Here’s something that might blow your mind: Your phone and email program has been quietly building a contact database for you all along. Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail – they’ve been tracking every person you’ve ever communicated with. It’s like having a personal assistant you didn’t know you hired!
And this article is going to help you find those contacts, organize them, and put them into a database you can use for your campaign. By the time you’re done reading this and implementing these suggestions, you’ll have grown your campaign contact list from zero to several thousand contacts without doing very much heavy lifting.
Let’s get started!
Taking Stock: Your Network Audit
Let’s break down your network into manageable chunks. Think of it as taking inventory of your relationship warehouse:
- Personal Circle: Family, friends, neighbors (yes, even that cousin who always argues politics at Thanksgiving – especially them!)
- Professional Network: Current and former colleagues, business partners, clients, vendors (that person you did that project with three years ago? They count!)
- Community Connections: Fellow PTA members, religious organization contacts, sports league buddies, local club members. Believe it or not, these are some of the most active and engaged local advocacy contacts and they’re probably going to be your first donors and volunteers.
- Social Media Sphere: LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends, Twitter followers. In my experience, social exports are not helpful — they just don’t provide much usable data. More on that in a bit.
Your own personal contacts are, of course, yours to do with whatever you wish. But some organizations do NOT want you to email or contact their members with commercial or political solicitations. So be careful about contacting people on a PTA list without first having express permission to do so. Even in those situations, rather than contacting people through a mailing list, I have contacted them individually to get their permission to add them to my campaign list. I usually do that through text message when i have their cell phone number. When I made the personal outreach and explained why I was contacting them, they gave me permission to use their information. The key word here is “permission” and if you’re building your campaign network, you want to get their permission before adding them to an application that allows you to contact people en masse.
Remember, the key is to build a list of people who WANT to hear from you, not to build a large list of random people who will never engage. I’ll take 5,000 people who engage with all my emails over a list of 5 million people who never engage.
The Magic of Modern Tech: Building Your Database
Now, here’s where we get tactical. I rolodexed my own contact sources and came up with a total of 10,630 contacts. The entire process took me a few minutes to request or convert the data. LinkedIn took slightly longer to deliver because they make you request the data through a web form. The form took 10 seconds to complete, but it took a few hours for the data to arrive. All told, not too bad.
Here’s the step-by-step guide on how I built my personal campaign contact list:
Cell Phone (5,609 contacts)
I have an iPhone. I opened the contacts app on my Mac, navigated to the file menu, and selected Export and then Export vCard. To move the vCard contacts into a csv, I used https://www.aconvert.com — an online tool. It took less than 1 minute and it worked beautifully and for free.
These are family members, friends, and personal connections, so I expect them to be great contacts who are likely to engage often.
Email Contacts (2,052 contacts)
If you’re like me, you have a gmail.com address and a few g-suite addresses. I think they call it Google Workplace now. In a year it will probably be called something else, but you get what I’m saying, right? Most of these are people I’ve done business with, so I expect these to be good contacts as well.
Google is easy to download contacts. Go to the contacts app at https://contacts.google.com. In the top right, click the icon that looks like an arrow coming out of a box. That will pop an export window. Choose Google CSV as the format option. The process should take only a few seconds.
Social Media
You can download your social media contacts, but generally it’s a waste of time when building your campaign network. Years ago, you could download your lists and the networks would provide all the info they had. Name, phone, email, even addresses. Now, most people leave their info private, so even if you can get data exports of friends and followers, it’s not likely to yield many usable contact points like phone number or email.
For the purpose of this article, and to demonstrate the limited usefulness of downloading social media contacts, I exporting my info from LinkedIn, which I’ve been using almost since the day it was created.
I was stunned to see that I had more almost 3,000 contacts there, and, judging by the amount of spam I get from LinkedIn messages these days, I expect many of these contacts to be junk, but there are a few people I know will engage so I downloaded them anyway.
For LinkedIn, you have to request an archive of your data, which you can do here: https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/download-my-data. Your data will come in the form of a notification to your registered email address. When you click over to download it, you’ll get a zip file containing all your different types of data in csv format. I got messages, receipts for purchases made through LinkedIn, events attended, and a dozen other data types. I also got a CSV file of connections which had the names and LinkedIn profiles of all my contacts, but only 50 email addresses. The export mentions that only the information contacts allow to be downloaded gets included. So, in reality, my list of 3,000 people is reduced to about 50 usable contacts. I’ve done this with Facebook and Twitter in the past and got similar results. I suspect you will too, which is why I mentioned earlier that exporting from social networks is a waste of time.
Organizing for Success: The Campaign Planner Approach
After managing campaigns from school board to presidential level, I’ve learned that organization is a critical skill to when building your campaign network. It helps in just about every facet of a campaign. There are two types of basic organization we want to work on. The first is data sanitization and the second is contact segmentation.
Data Sanitization
The different CSV files you now have must be merged somehow. Also, the data itself needs to be cleaned and condensed. For instance one file uses fields like “first_name” and “last_name” while another file uses “full name.” One file uses the field “phone” while another uses “mobile phone.”
The first thing I did was merge all the CSV files into separate tabs of a spreadsheet, naming each one for the source of the export. I created another empty spreadsheet and started columns (fields) for each of the contact fields I had in all the sheets. Here’s a quick list of the fields I think you’ll need too.
- firstName
- lastName
- phone
- address1
- address2
- address3
- city
- state
- zip
- source
- tags
You’ll notice I use camel case for the field names, with no spaces. That’s where you use lowercase for the first word and a single capital for all future words, with no spaces. When working with data, I find it’s the best method.
That’s really all you need for a quick database.
I then went into each of the export tabs and copied over the data from one tab to my master tab and put the correct data into the new fields named above. This is just a simple copy and paste, no deduping yet.
Once I had all my contacts in one sheet I deduped them to remove duplicates. My goal is to retain as many email and phone numbers I could since those are the main outreach methods for any contact. Most spreadsheet programs have a quick dedupe method. Excel has this. So does Google Sheets. Mac numbers has a service you can apply called “copy distinct” to make this work.
In another article I’ll write more about building out an actual political CRM, which can serve as the hub of your contact efforts. I use a tool / template which I created for Notion called Political Campaign Planner. I’ll have a full tutorial on that tool soon. It’s the hub I use to manage campaigns for myself and candidates I work with. It’s an incredible tool that I built based on the experience I gained working with many successful local candidates over the years.
Segmentation
With the final CRM/database in place, I spent some time segmenting my list by tagging my contacts with tags like:
- potential donor
- business owner
- family
- friend
- potential volunteer
The list of potential tags is limitless, but I recommend sticking to major categories. Eventually, when we start sending messages we’ll try to send messages just to people for whom those messages are relevant. We do NOT want to send every message to every person on our list. That’s a quick way to get your messages trapped in spam boxes.
For instance, if I know a specific contact is interested in topics like the economy or finance or jobs, I might tag them with “economy” and send them the messages I create that are relevant for that topic.
Making the Most of Your Network
In the end, my list of 10,000 contacts ended up being just over 5,000 usable contacts — so about half. Still, that’s a pretty good number for a few hours of work. However, your network isn’t just about who you know – it’s about who they know. Each person in your database is potentially a gateway to hundreds more contacts.
Think of it this way: If each person in your network knows just 10 people who might support your campaign, and you start with 100 contacts, you’ve suddenly got access to 1,000 potential supporters. In my case, if each person could introduce me to just 2 people, that’s more than 10,000 potential contacts and engagements I can garner.
While this article isn’t about fundraising, in my experience you can expect a certain amount to be raised per person on your database. Of course, not everyone will donate, but some will — and a few of them will donate big. When averaged across your entire list, it’s likely a few dollars per person. In my experience, my lists generated around $6 per person. So a list of 5,000 people should generate around $30,000 over the course of an election. Of course, those numbers are not gospel — they’re highly subjective. I’ve known candidates with fewer than 2,000 contacts who raised several hundred thousand dollars in a cycle, which puts their number at about $65 per list member. It’s all relative to the amount of work you put in – and that’s a conversation for another day.
Also, it’s important to remember, these aren’t just names in a database – they’re real people with real relationships. The key is to maintain and nurture these connections. Use a system like the Political Campaign Planner to track every interaction, every commitment, and every follow-up needed.
When starting any campaign, my first message is an “I’m Running!” email to let people know I’ve created a campaign and that I would appreciate their help. I don’t ask for money in that first message, but I do ask them to share my website and social links. In some cases, I’ve asked them to forward my email to their own email list with the express goal of getting even more subscribers to my list. That first message can double or even triple your list in the span of a few weeks. You can also create a few “1st messages” and send them to your segmented lists. For example, I might send one message to my family with a more specific and urgent ask for volunteer help. Then send another general message to my friends.
Your Next Steps
Ready to turn your network into campaign net worth? Here’s what to do right now:
- Start exporting those contact lists – today, not tomorrow
- Set up your campaign database (seriously, check out the Political Campaign Planner template)
- Begin categorizing your contacts while their relationships are fresh in your mind
- Start to think about what your first message might entail and to whom it might be sent.
Remember, every successful campaign I’ve ever managed started with exactly what you have right now – a network of relationships waiting to be activated. The only difference between a winning campaign and a losing one often comes down to how well you organize and utilize these connections.
Your existing network is your campaign’s secret weapon. You’ve spent years building these relationships – now it’s time to put them to work for your political future. Trust me, with the right approach to organizing your contacts, you’re already halfway to victory.
