August End of Month Financial Reports

[Tim Hagan]

The August End-of-Month Financial Reports are attached. 

The recurring gifts dropped below $50,000. The 50th Anniversary Party was profitable with revenues of $90.8k & expenses of $76.7k.

Tim Hagan

Treasurer, Libertarian National Committee

[Ken Moellman]

All -

I would like to discuss finding a way to raise revenue and bump membership numbers.  I would like to do so without interfering with the staff in their normal efforts. The goal is supplemental income, not taking away from what staff is already doing.

(1) My first thought is to contract out the Monthy Recurring renewals as they expire (CC expiration, etc).  We apparently used to have this as part of Bob Johnston's position, prior to it being eliminated.  I think it would be wise to see if Bob would be willing to do this job part-time and work through a few months worth of expired MRC donors, to see what he could bring back in.  We now have the ability to easily track effectiveness with referral codes, so we should be able to easily report on the effectiveness of such a contract.

(2) Additionally, I would like to discuss the concept of a "refer your friends" program, where someone can get credit for referring a new member to the party.  I have a few different ideas on how this would work, and it would need to have some limits.  But if we can combine this effort with the joint fundraising plan, we should be able to entice more states into the joint fundraising, and we should be able to essentially grow a small army of membership recruiters.  

My basic thoughts on such a program would be:
(a) Only recruiting people who either have never been a donor or haven't been a donor in at least 5 years would be an eligible sign-up.

(b) An eligible sign-up would result in a credit of 20% of a donation to national would go to the person who referred the new member.  

(c) Each person would have their eligible donations tallied at the end of each calendar year.  If a person racks up a credit of over $250 in a calendar year, they would get paid out in January.  If they rack up over $1,000 in a quarter, we would pay that quarterly.

(d) Staff and LNC members would not be eligible to receive the credit or payout.

As a sub-item under (b), if a state with a joint fundraising agreement would also like to do the same, we can amend the existing agreements and fix future agreements to have 20% of their part of the donation go to the recruiter as well.  This would incentivize the use of the joint membership form by the recruiters.

Again, this could be tracked easily through referral codes, which are now super-simple to set up. 

I'm open to ideas, but dropping below 50,000 MR donors brought all of this back to the front of my mind.

Ken Moellman

Libertarian National Committee

Vice Chair

[John Wilford]

Definitely love the idea of contracting out lapsed donor renewal to Bob or whoever else. I think the referral program could benefit from some kind of workshopping or meeting. Even just an out of business session zoom call but I'm not opposed to it overall.

John Wilford | Region 7 Alternate
442 Valley View Dr
Lewisville, TX 75067
903-372-6931 Mobile  |  www.lp.org

[Chris Luchini]

We had a referral program earlier this year, which was canceled.

The issue is enforcing the rules as to what is an eligible donation consumes far more staff time then the referral program generates in income.

Unless this issue can be addressed, I would oppose any referral program that involves cash payments.

[Ken Moellman]

We can automate the process.  A query to compare donations with referral codes and a cross reference with previous donations from the same person.  Easy peasy.

Ken Moellman

Libertarian National Committee

Vice Chair

[Susan Hogarth]

I feel like ‘automate the process’ and ‘easy peasy’  are red flags when talking about this sort of thing. 

We should have a good idea of what staff currently does to retain members, and whether such measures are cost-effective (and effective in other ways) before we jump in with new ideas. 

- Susan Hogarth 

Region 5 Representative 

--

Susan Hogarth
919-906-2106
Region 5 Representative

[Richard Longstreth]

I believe volunteering for some call time and lapsed members getting a call from their regional representative, alternate, or at large members would help retention too and is probably more effective than automation. Ms Desisto has many times tried to get volunteers from this board to work with her and, myself included, have not always risen to that challenge. Staff wants to work on this with us, let's not try to reinvent the wheel.

Richard Longstreth
At Large Representative
Libertarian National Committee
richard.l...@lp.org
931.538.9300

Sent from my Mobile Device

[Whitney Bilyeu]

Staffing decisions fall under the Executive Director's purview, with advice and consent from the Chair. Ken, I recommend reaching out to Tyler to discuss specific ideas or questions you may have about specific roles past, present, or future.

Whitney Bilyeu

LNC | Chair

LP.org

[Ken Moellman]

I'm suggesting there are things that we can do, right now, to supplement the staff's current actions.  This would not interfere with or otherwise alter what staff is currently doing for fundraising; it would be supplemental.

For MR donors with expiring credit cards, there are several options. I've recently done some call time. The call time wasn't focused on contacting MR expirations, though it probably could be adapted to do that. Honestly, I would rather have someone who is familiar with and has successfully renewed expiring MR donors to do that work, specifically, as that seems almost more like a "debt collector" than fundraising (that's not the exact description I'm trying for, but I hope that makes sense). And, in addition, I believe we should look to automate some of our actions to make them more efficient. The call time process consumes the time of two people. Automation is all about getting the easy stuff out of the way, so the time of those two people is more focused and therefore more efficient. We have automated renewal email capabilities in the Civi side of things, and some states are/were using it. Renewal calls could then focus on the people for whom that isn't enough. (And as an aside: I was specifically calling IT people, one actually asked why I called instead of just sending an email.)

As to a new renewal program, I think there's a lot of merit in referring friends and offloading the seeking of new members. The ability to create referral codes on the fly is already implemented, created and completed approximately 1 day before the program was stopped.  If any new iteration of the program has minimums, then it ensures that any staff time necessary to fulfil the payout on the agreements would be offset by successfully obtaining new revenue.  Right now, states have incentive to push national membership, because of the looming cut-off date for 2022 convention delegate allocation. But what happens after October?  IMO we should have a plan to incentivize people to help us bring in the next wave of new members. This would be targeted toward getting members for whom we have no knowledge of their existence, no information for them, and no other way to reasonably find them.  New, unknown leads; not existing leads or former members.  Imagine running this program Nov 1, 2021 through Nov 1, 2022.  A small army of active recruiters working during the 2022 election cycle!

I will talk with Tyler on these issues. I did speak to him a few months ago about the referral program. Ultimately, the sense I was left with was that this board needs to decide what it wants to do with the referral program. We should commit to it, if we're going to do it, or not do it; the spin-up and the spin-down are the "expensive" parts, especially when done suddenly.  At the time the referral program was killed, it was said that it cost too much to maintain a $25 donor. I don't think that math checks out, and would like to look at the specifics behind that math. Even if it did, we're a membership-based political organization that seeks popular support at the polls. My state regional affiliate sent a postcard, late in the 2019 cycle in KY, to all registered Libertarians in one KY congressional district. It was the first time we ever tried it; we saw that the counties where there was that single postcard all full USPS postcard rate that arrived right before election day did increase our vote totals.  Engaging Libertarians, even at a (relatively) slight loss, and even way late in the game, increased our electoral results. I've also done robocalls with some positive results. Even though that costs money, doing those sorts of activities more intelligently, at a lower cost, and in a more timely fashion would likely have an even better result; and the more contacts we have to reach, the more effective such action is likely to be. 

In any case, my thought was that MR donations dropping below 50k/mo would be an opportunity to discuss how to improve/enhance processes.  As I originally noted, I'm open to ideas. I'm always open to ideas. 

Ken Moellman

Libertarian National Committee

Vice Chair

[TJ Ferreira]

I don't know which payment processor we use for monthly recurring, but most offer an updater service to prevent recurring donations from expiring. If our processor doesn't offer it, there are also 3rd party services. Each time I have looked into them, their prices are reasonable compared to the lost revenue from expiring cards.

Tim "TJ" Ferreira

LNC Region 4 Alternate Representative