Building Your Campaign Network: The Art of Rolodexing Your Contacts

Let me tell you a secret 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 you’re probably using to read this post is a treasure chest of campaign potential, and it’s the first step in building your campaign network. Every email you’ve ever sent, every phone call you’ve received, every business card you’ve collected, 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 have 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.

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 and implementing these suggestions, you’ll have grown your campaign contact list from zero to several thousand contacts without doing much heavy lifting.

Let’s get started.

Taking stock: your network audit

Let’s break your network into manageable chunks. Think of it as taking inventory of your relationship warehouse:

• Personal circle: family, friends, neighbours — 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 a project with three years ago? They count.
• Community connections: fellow PTA members, religious organization contacts, sports league buddies, local club members. 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 yours to do with whatever you wish. But some organizations do not want you emailing or contacting their members with commercial or political solicitations. So be careful about contacting people on a PTA list without first having express permission.

Even then, rather than contacting people through a mailing list, I’ve contacted them individually to ask permission to add them to my campaign list — usually by text message when I have their cell number. When I made that personal outreach and explained why I was contacting them, they gave me permission to use their information. The key word is permission, and if you’re building your campaign network you want it before adding anyone to a tool that lets you contact people en masse.

Remember, the goal is a list of people who WANT to hear from you, not 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

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 a few minutes to request or convert the data. LinkedIn took longer to deliver because they make you request it 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 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, went to the File menu, and selected Export → Export vCard. To move the vCard contacts into a CSV I used aconvert.com, an online tool. It took less than a minute, it worked beautifully, and it was free.

These are family members, friends, and personal connections, so I expect them to be great contacts who engage often.

Email contacts (2,052 contacts)

If you’re like me you have a Gmail address and a few Google Workspace addresses. Most of these are people I’ve done business with, so I expect them to be good contacts as well.

Google makes this easy. Go to contacts.google.com. In the top right, click the icon that looks like an arrow coming out of a box. That pops an export window — choose Google CSV as the format. The whole thing takes 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 hand over everything they had: name, phone, email, even addresses. Now most people keep their info private, so even if you can get an export of friends and followers it’s not likely to yield many usable contact points.

To demonstrate, I exported my info from LinkedIn, which I’ve used almost since the day it was created. I was stunned to see I had almost 3,000 contacts there — and, judging by the amount of spam I get from LinkedIn messages these days, I expect many 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 at linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/download-my-data. Your data arrives as a notification to your registered email address. When you click over to download it you get a zip file containing all your data types in CSV format: messages, receipts, events attended, and a dozen others. I also got a CSV of connections with the names and profiles of all my contacts — but only 50 email addresses. The export notes that only the information contacts allow to be downloaded is included. So in reality my list of 3,000 people reduces 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.

Organizing for success

After managing campaigns from school board to presidential level, I’ve learned that organization is a critical skill when building your campaign network. There are two pieces of basic organization to work on: data sanitization and contact segmentation.

Data sanitization

The different CSV files you now have need to be merged, and the data itself needs to be cleaned and condensed. One file uses first_name and last_name while another uses full name. One uses phone while another uses mobile phone.

The first thing I did was merge all the CSV files into separate tabs of one spreadsheet, naming each tab for the source of the export. Then I created an empty sheet and started a column for each of the contact fields I had across all the sheets. Here’s the quick list of fields I think you’ll need:

• firstName
• lastName
• phone
• email
• address1
• address2
• address3
• city
• state
• zip
• source
• tags

You’ll notice I use camel case for the field names, with no spaces — lowercase for the first word, a single capital for every word after, 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 export tab and copied the data over to my master tab, putting the right data into the right fields. This is a simple copy and paste — no deduping yet.

Once all my contacts were in one sheet, I deduped them. My goal was to retain as many emails and phone numbers as possible, since those are the main outreach methods for any contact. Most spreadsheet programs have a quick dedupe: Excel has one, so does Google Sheets, and Mac Numbers has a “copy distinct” service that does the job.

Segmentation

With the final database in place, I spent some time segmenting my list by tagging contacts:

• 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 send each message only to the people for whom it’s relevant. We do not want to send every message to every person on our list — that’s a quick way to get trapped in spam boxes.

If I know a specific contact cares about the economy or finance or jobs, I might tag them “economy” and send them the messages I create on that topic.

Making the most of your network

In the end, my list of 10,000 contacts turned into just over 5,000 usable contacts — about half. Still a pretty good number for a few hours of work.

But 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. If every person in your network knows just 10 people who might support your campaign, and you start with 100 contacts, you suddenly have access to 1,000 potential supporters. In my case, if each person introduced me to just two people, that’s more than 10,000 potential contacts and engagements.

This article isn’t about fundraising, but in my experience you can expect a certain amount to be raised per person on your database. Not everyone will donate, but some will — and a few will donate big. Averaged across the whole list, it’s likely a few dollars per person. 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. 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 them at about $65 per list member. It’s all relative to the amount of work you put in.

It’s also 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 those connections, and 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 launched and that I’d 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 the email to their own list with the express goal of getting more subscribers. That first message can double or even triple your list in the span of a few weeks. You can also write a few different first messages and send them to your segmented lists — one to family with a more specific and urgent ask for volunteer help, another, more general one to friends.

Your next steps

Ready to turn your network into campaign net worth? Here’s what to do right now:

1. Start exporting those contact lists — today, not tomorrow.
2. Set up your campaign database.
3. Begin categorizing your contacts while the relationships are fresh in your mind.
4. Start thinking about what your first message says and who it goes to.

Every successful campaign I’ve ever managed started with exactly what you have right now: a network of relationships waiting to be activated. The difference between a winning campaign and a losing one often comes down to how well you organize and use those 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.