How Much Money Does Your Campaign Need?

In politics, money plays a crucial role in deciding how successful you can be. While you don’t need any of it to win, it makes it significantly more difficult for you to win without it. Money allows you to do many things like hosting events, providing campaign materials to voters, run advertisements, host a website, hire staff, and many more. In an ideal world, we’d have unlimited money and resources to get whatever we need for the campaign, but that’s not possible. Between having to fundraise, canvas, and campaign, most of your day will be taken up. Deciding how much time you need to allocate to fundraising should be based on the amount that you need.So what is the amount of money that you need to run a campaign? In this article we will go over basic expenses and what you can strive to fundraise to meet your goals.

Before we start, always check into your state's rules and regulations in regards to campaign finance and reporting. It is crucial that you are compliant with your finances, or else you can receive harsh penalties and possibly jail time for abusing campaign finance laws. Now that you are compliant, let’s try and create a budget forecast.  All campaigns should forecast their costs to give you a good idea what you will need and how close you are to your goal. Whether you are a large or small campaign, the first thing to do is find your biggest expense. For some campaigns it is staffing, for some it's advertisements. This is based on your campaign strategy and how many people are in your district. For large populations, staffing becomes one of the most expensive costs to a campaign. While in very small campaigns, the cost to print and send flyers might be the most expensive.  Once you decide what kind of services you need, start a spreadsheet with those up top. 

Now you need to look at the costs to host your events and how much you need to partake in your other campaign related materials. For example you may come up with a cost of $3500 for an event and $700 to send out mailers. Once you have these, you multiply them by the number of times you’d like to do them. Now that you have your major costs budgeted you now have to plan for your smaller costs. These are things like, how much do you want to allocate to food and drinks, how much are you spending on gas for traveling, are you going to provide any gifts, how much does it take to run your website, what are the costs to enter a debate or any other event, what are the fees associated in collecting donations, and many more.  

Some good rules of thumb are that you will pay a fee for donations so expect to need 3% - 7% more than what you budgeted for. You should expect to pay $300 - $700 per large meal you host. Events can  easily run you $3000 - $5000 or even more depending on the scale and location.  You can create and send a flier by mail for about $1 per person. Travel fees should be your lowest amount. Campaign managers and staff can cost upwards of $150,000 or more depending on the number of people you hire.

With all of these things in mind, a typical budget for really small campaigns is around $10,000 - $25,000. For medium sized campaigns it typically costs $100,000 - $250,000. For large campaigns it costs $400,000 - $1,500,000, and for very large campaigns it can easily cost well over $10 million dollars. Using these numbers as a general rule of thumb, you can start allocating how much time you need to spend fundraising. Remember that there is no penalty to fundraising more than you need, and if you go over what you need, you can always use it on unplanned campaign activities that will help improve your chances at winning. To help you improve how you fundraise, please use APS Sciences Fundraising tools to give you a significant boost in how much you can fundraise.