The Future of GOP Small Dollar Fundraising: Strategies and Challenges

Digital strategist John Hall discusses the challenges and opportunities in GOP small dollar fundraising, the impact of tech censorship, and the future of digital political campaigns. Gain insights into industry tactics, ethical considerations, and innovative technologies shaping political fundraising. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

This is the Digital Politics Podcast, presented by Frontline Strategies. Hello and welcome to the Digital Politics Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Hahn, president of digital at Frontline Strategies. Every month we promise to break down what matters to the GOP digital industry, talk to the people driving the change, and give you the insights you won't find anywhere else. This month's guest is a familiar face on X, and if you've seen this post, you know he doesn't hold back on his criticisms of the GOP digital fundraising industry. You might not always agree with him, but he's asking the questions that nobody else wants to answer. How do we actually respect our small dollar donors? He's raised more than $1.6 billion from nearly 60 million online contributions, was an original hire at Target Victory where he worked for over a decade and today leads the team at John Hall Strategies. John Hall, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's good to good to chat with you this morning. Right. I'm excited to have you. I'm actually very excited about this one. Um we have talked quite a bit over the last few months, and we've realized that we actually agree on quite more than we thought. And where we disagree, maybe we'll uh we'll we'll talk about during the podcast, but it's definitely going to be a good chat. So thank you for coming on.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Yeah, thank you for having me. I've uh I I have admired the things you have done over the last couple years. I think you're you're doing some some really great work. So I'm I'm uh I'm excited to to chat with you today.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

I appreciate that. Thank you. All right, let's start with the big question. You ready? I'm ready. Why are Republicans losing to Democrats on small dollar fundraising? Um, I know you and I have talked about whether it's strategy, whether it's censorship, and I want to hear more of your thoughts on that and and let the audience decide.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Yeah, I mean, I I think to start, the the whether it's censorship or strategy, I think censorship is a very uh convenient excuse that just lets us change the topic away from what the problem might be. Um if you go back and you start looking years and years ago, there probably was a little bit of bias. Um, I I think you could look at the email, uh, just how email worked. And I think that's where most of the bias has been has been pointed out. And it's, I mean, a lot of it has been centered around Gmail. And I again, I think if you look back 10 years ago, five years ago, there may have been uh the Democrats getting a little bit more preferential treatment. I don't know that it was a systemic thing. I don't know that it was something built into the code. I think it was probably the Democrats had more friends over at Google and they could call up their friends and their friends could reset their reputation and they could get their inboxing to be improved. But I think today with the changes that Google has made, I it just I don't I don't know how it how it's possible. I mean, you can call your our the representatives we have at Google, they'll put you in a remediation plan and can kind of solve some problems, assuming you don't do stupid stuff. And so it's just censorship is just an easy, it's just an easy excuse. And it's and people will buy it. Like I think Republicans have a tendency to want to think that the big tech companies are are liberal and that they are trying to get us. And so it's just it kind of fits into that narrative. The I I think to go to your second question of as to why we are behind the Democrats and consistently are behind I I do think it goes back just to the idea of how we set up our programs. The Democrats, I mean, you can go look at the ad archive and see the amount of advertising they run all the time. You can um, if you talk to any of the democratic strategists, uh, they will talk about how much lead generation they do, how they grow their lists. And I just on our side, we've kind of lost that. Like we focus so much on optimizing for initial return. Um, and that has created the situation where everybody chases the exact same donors because a donor is the person, a past donor is the person that is most likely to give to you again. And so if you were thinking about it, I need to get the highest return today, of course you're gonna go back to known donors. But if everybody is always focused on known donors and there aren't a lot of people going out finding new donors, it creates a situation where we're really just cannibalizing each other's programs. Um and I think that's what we're we're starting to see, or not starting, it's what we are seeing. Um, and it has been a little bit amplified, amplified in some of the Senate races. If you just look at the discrepancy between what the Democrats are raising of small dollar and what um what what we're raising. And so I I do think it kind of goes back to strategy and just how we set up programs on the on the front end and and what we view as success versus um kind of what the Democrats view as success.

SPEAKER_00 4:37

So we've actually talked about this on the podcast before about the Democrats strategy versus the Republican strategy. Republicans tend to rely on Rev shares, which I am for. People may find out later on in the podcast, you're you are against. Um I I tend to think that what the Democrats do can lead to cannibalization more than what we do because we have more data that we're able to hit, especially later on in the cycle, than Democrats have on their house files and they're constantly re-adding the same folks. Would you agree with that?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

I don't, I I if you look at the population, if you look at the American population, if we just were to say that half are Democrats, I'm not accurate, but if we were to say that half are Democrats, so you have 160 million, maybe more, people that you could that Democrats could target to add to their programs, um, I I would say that it it would be very hard for them to totally exhaust the fo the places they they could go. Um I the the the challenge with their strategy is that it does rely on you have to have good inboxing on email. You have to have low costs on text messaging if you're gonna use text in order to get messages out to these people, because there is a huge cost to marketing to these folks that you're adding in mass. I don't know that I believe that they can't. I don't, I don't, I don't know that they really have to cannibalize as as much as your your question kind of leads to, because there are just so many people that they can go after. I mean, you can and we could do the same thing. I mean, you can run. I mean, we we do a little bit of um regeneration where you're just running running to four or four, three or four Republicans in a state. And I mean, those lists end up, I mean it depends on the state, but those lists end up being pretty big. Um, and it gives you a pretty large pool of people to to kind of focus on um to try to get added to your program. But it goes to the next part of it, which is where I think this is where the Democrats are just generally better than us, is like what is the what is the follow-up when you get someone on your file? Like, how are you treating them once you collect that email address and phone number? And and if you go back 10 years, you go back 15 years when digital was really becoming a focus on a lot of these campaigns, we would sit around and we would talk about like what is the welcome series look like? What does like how are we treating these people after they make it to the file? Because so much of the focus was building a house file. And I think, I mean, there are certainly groups that do that today, but I mean, there are some vendors now that run fundraising programs that that say that they're full fundraising programs that don't even send house email. So I don't know how you can, I don't know how you like build those kind of welcome series when you don't even have the um, we don't even have uh the systems in place. You're not even trying to. So um that was me going off a little bit on a tangent, I guess, when you're gonna do that.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

No, I and I want to get to that stuff. That's that's where I'm leading next. Is you you said in your first answer, you know, Google will usually do the right thing by you and by your campaigns so long as you're not doing, I think it was your word, stupid stuff. And I I agree with that. I do think the censorship stuff is an excuse created by vendors who are underperforming and have nothing else to blame. Uh it's just simply something that we're not seeing here at Frontline. Uh, I don't think you're seeing it at your company as well, not divulging on private conversations, but uh, I don't think either of us are seeing it the way that it is being portrayed. Um, but you do mention stupid stuff. So where is the industry really starting to cross the line with small dollar donors that are getting them in trouble with uh some of uh the the spam filters and just the general tactics that we're using for small dollar donors?

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Yeah, I mean, well, there's two there's two kind of lines. I mean, there's the line that is the line that like on email will get you in trouble. So if you're all of a sudden using kind of fake senders, like you don't in your sender name, you do things that say like GOP update, um, those kind of things will get you in trouble with the the Gmails of the world, the ARLs of the world, the postmasters who want you to identify who you are as a as a sender. But then you have like the second part of your question, which is like where do we, how is it that we destroy our vendor relationships? And like the destroying the donor relationships, I mean, it it's primarily done now from from my vantage point on text. Like text has made it too easy to reach people. Like on email, you had to be thoughtful. You had to, you had to warm up a you had to warm up a list, you had to, there's just certain things you have to do. There are certain rules if you want to stay in inboxes. On text, there isn't it. So you have these people sending these fake check texts promising $6,000 that are going to be delivered to you in the next 30 minutes if you will confirm your address with a donation. They fabricated quotes from the president and uh probably other people, but but certainly there was one recently that used a fake quote from the president saying he's trying to get your address. Like those kinds of things are not just, they're not just bad for the donor experience, like a donor being duped into giving a donation because they think that a $6,000 check is coming. Um, I mean, it's crossing a line from that perspective, but also crosses the line in terms of where where the wire fraud statutes are. You start getting into situations where this could very well be fraud. And um, I I think that that's like a whole other problem that that we as an industry probably need to address. I mean, we have a rule, like I've had a rule for the last, I mean, I it should have been a rule we always had, but at least for the last five years, where like if it's not honest, we don't send it. Like I think that's like a pretty basic barrier that people ought to follow. And I think on so much of the, on so much of the content that is created today, there is no, there is no, there's no honesty. I mean, you have people asking, like saying you need to fill out your voter profile. And I get the voter profile stuff. I mean, it seems like it's working for folks, but telling people if you don't fill out your voter profile, we're gonna consider you a Democrat. I mean, it it it I mean, it's fake. There's no that nobody is considering these people Democrats. You don't, you don't confirm your voter profile by making a donation. I saw that Eric Wilson had flagged the other um last week or two weeks ago, somebody asking people to make phone calls for the campaign because the campaign needed support making phone calls. But in order to sign up to do it, you had to make a donation. Like these things are just like they're crazy. Like there is no industry in which you would take the people that are most valuable to you, the folks that have donated to you before, and you would either call them names, you would send them things that are that are straight lies, or you would make them make a donation in order to actually help your campaign, like do something that's not fundraising related. And so all of those things cross cross a line. And it's just a question of do they just cross a line from the the donor perspective, like the donor, like we're never going to give to you again because you guys are fraudsters perspective, or are they actually crossing laws uh or crossing the line when it comes to laws? And I kind of hope that some of these folks that are doing this do get investigated. And I hope we can figure out a way that we can stop, we can stop this because it's not, it's not good. Um, it's not good for anybody. I mean, it's not even good for the people sending the messages. They're they're not netting anything on their on their sands, they're probably breaking even on it. And then these donors are not even their donors, they're donors that think they're getting a $6,000 check that's never gonna arise, arise. So I can't imagine there's gonna be a lot of second and third donations coming in from those people.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

I want to read the text that got both of us kind of riled up over the weekend. Um, but you know who the vendor is. I'm not gonna name the vendor. Um, and I'm only saying that because I'm gonna make a point after I read it. It's name working late and want to get your address right. Is it blank comma state dropping off your six thousand dollar check in a minute? And then it takes you to a donation page where you need to confirm your address. It's just a win red uh widget where you put your address, and then you need to donate to confirm it. Um it's egregious for certain. I mean, a lot of the the six thousand dollar check stuff, um, some of it is written fine, but a text like that is is just bad. And this specific vendor is not someone that we send for on frontline prospecting um for a variety of reasons. Which kind of takes me to my next question here is uh, what is the solution to some of this stuff, John? Who's responsible for fixing this, for cleaning it up outside of just, you know, uh the FEC or legal investigations? Who in the industry can actually help clean this up? Is it campaigns, consultants, prospectors, platforms? What do you think?

SPEAKER_01 13:15

Um let me answer, let me make one more point and then I'll answer that question. So I tweeted, I tweeted it. You read the text that I tweeted about within 15 minutes of me tweeting it, maybe it was 30 minutes, but it was within a pretty short period of time, the vendor had taken down that page and it just redirects when you take down a page on Red, it just redirects the default page. So it just went directly to the default page. And I I referenced that because these folks know what they're doing, you probably shouldn't do. Since then, I've also gotten no text messages. Like I always have when I tweet things, I usually block out enough of the personal information so folks can't really determine the source. This one I think was was enough people looked into it so they realized I had gotten it myself. Um, and so they took me off their list. So I'm not getting any messages. I I think it goes back to my point about always being honest. If you are so fearful that somebody is going to tweet something about you and make you look bad from the content that you're sending, you probably shouldn't send that content. Like there isn't a world in which you should be taking down your donation page after someone calls some something out. Like if you're if you're truly proud of the things you do, that wouldn't be your reaction. Your reaction would have been to reach out to me and to tell me that the I'm just wrong and that it isn't fraud and that it's fine. And so um I I think it goes and you kind of referenced some of the vendors. Like, I mean, I think one of the other problems we have in our industry is you have these like all these vendors popping up and they all come up with names that you've never heard on before. They're generally run by actors that few people in our industry know very closely. And they go in and they do these kinds of tactics, which are akin to the Nigerian prints scams that that we all have seen get emailed for the past 20 years. And um, I mean, it does we do need to like this does need to be cleaned up. Um, and then going like that leads right into the responsibility. I mean, it all of us have a responsibility. I think people like me have a responsibility to call it out, and that's what I try to do. I get myself blocked. So now I'm locked at their tags, it's gonna be harder for me to call them out in the future. But um, but I think that that is like a step is those of us that think this is wrong ought to be saying something and ought to be telling, telling folks. Um, I think the platforms, like in this case, this would have been WinRed, they have the most leverage, they have the most ability to kind of police these things and to hold people, hold people to account. But they also have the least incentive to do it. I mean, they just, I mean, they have to, for them to exist, they have to have campaigns that are going to process donations on their platform. They have to have vendors that want to use them. They have they make their money all based on the number of transactions coming in. So I think it's very hard for them when they're thinking about their business to say, okay, this vendor who maybe is doing some questionable things, we need to either deplatform or refund charges or do things like that. I think it's just a very hard thing that they're that I think they've been grappling with now. I have no direct knowledge of this, but I believe um it's something that they've just had to grapple with for the past however since 2019 when when Red became a thing. Um, and I think you also add to that, like just the first where we started this conversation was censorship. Like nobody on our side wants anybody stepping in to censor. So they don't want to be considered a big tech company that's censoring. So I think it's a very, it's very tough for them to to kind of solve this. And my hope is that they do, that they step in and they come up with some rules. But I mean, I understand that the the the challenge they're in. Um I mean, consultants, people like me, people like you, like GCs, we have a we have a responsibility to our clients. Like we ought to be, I I would love if everybody would have my same kind of mantra of like, let's be honest. Like, I think that would solve the vast majority of these problems. Um but I also think many of the the consultants outside of uh outside of digital don't really know what it is we're doing. Like they just don't pay close enough attention. And and you like you know, like we all know, campaigns are a thousand things happening at any given moment. And so to be concerning yourself every moment about the content that your vendors are sending out is it would just be very hard. It's probably unrealistic, but I do think that they bear some, they do bear some responsibility in making sure that they're hiring vendors that are gonna have some ethical standards and that those ethical standards are being met all the time. Campaigns ought to be demanding like certain things beyond just gross revenue. Um, I think as long as we have the the measuring stick of your success is what's on your FEC report. If that's the only thing that people care about, we're going to continue focusing on the wrong things. We're going to be continually focusing on how do we just churn as much money as possible? And how do you churn as much money as possible? To your earlier point, you use Rev shares and you use Rev shares with the most aggressive copy possible. And you just, you're, you're churning, you're turning constantly. I don't believe that it leads to long-term success and believe it's pretty fleeting. Uh, but if the only thing you care about is posting a number that shows that you raise $3 million in a quarter or whatever it is, and you don't really care about how much you've netted, you don't really care about how many supporters you've added to your file. If the only thing you really care about is that that one number, we're going to continue with this, with this, uh, with this problem. But the responsibility lies with all of us. I mean, it's it's everywhere. It's the the platforms, it's consultants, it's campaignons, it's candidates. But um, I think for like my kind of point, the reason I tweet these things, the reason I write the posts that I write, the reason I come on podcasts and talk about this stuff is I would like to educate more people so that they ask the right questions. I think that we as an industry have created a situation where because we only care about gross revenue, because we don't really, nobody looks closely, we've we kind of tell vendors that they should be doing these kind of tactics. Like nobody is saying you should be committing fraud, but nobody is really putting value on anything beyond the types of thing that like the number that would lead you to do the most aggressive tactics possible. And so I think we just have to do a much better job of educating candidates and educating everybody. Um, and hopefully it over time it it kind of solves itself or or f or we can clean things up. I mean, if you think about it, like when you were at NRSC and I was uh still at targeted victory, there was a pretty big push among many of us to try to get rid of matching. Like I think we were looking and the matching had gotten insane. Like there were people doing 77 times matching. And so it took a little while. But you look today, I mean, matching has kind of gone by the wayside. Like people have generally accepted that it's in most cases, it's completely fabricated, it's a lie. And so you don't really see it. So I kind of think it's like all of these things. We just have to raise awareness of it. And hopefully folks will realize sending something, telling someone they could get a $6,000 check if they confirm their address and give a donation is not really a good tactic and people shouldn't use it.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

Uh real real quick on the matching, I uh it has fallen by the wayside. You're right. And I what I have seen is committees, for example, actually match it to high dollar donations, which I think is a really good idea and effective and certainly not scammy. Um with everything else that you said, I agree with probably about 80% of it in the sense that it does lie with the consultants like ourselves to make sure that we're not putting out content that can get our clients into trouble. Um where I'm not even sure I disagree, but where where I I probably have a different opinion is on Winred, I'm not sure what Winred can do about it. I think they're in a very tough spot. Um probably an impossible spot because they will get into becoming some type of content uh uh monitors or be called sensors in the sense that they're gonna be kicking people off their platform. So they're in a very tough spot. And on the Rev Share side, I I think I think how you use RevShares depends on your vendor. And we'll see if you agree with with me on this. But if you are doing Rev shares, yes, you have you know the ridiculous splits in favor of the list broker, but the real benefit of RevShares is uh the new data that you could potentially get. And if your vendor isn't uh ripping you off, they let you keep 100% of the recurring donations that come in off of RevShares, which in turn will boost your net and not just put up that high gross number. Um, I I I the clients at Frontline certainly benefit from the latter. We do not take any percentage of recurring from our uh our clients, and they're seeing actual net dollars in a very short amount of time come in. That's helping their campaigns on field programs or uh Uh maybe buy a a C T V ad in in a rather small DMA, um, whatever it may be. I I do think it's how you're utilizing the Rev shares that could be uh effective for campaigns depending on your vendors' tactics, thoughts.

SPEAKER_01 22:15

Yeah, I don't I mean, I don't think the idea of a Rev share is inherently bad. And I I think that where I think it goes off the the rails a little bit is over time when you end up focusing on the same lists over and over and over again. Like, I mean, I've done some analysis for some campaigns where I was told, like I was asked, like, why is the cost of fundraising so high with with this campaign? And I would go in and look, and the vast majority of the donors that they were getting via Rev shares were already on their file. And so if you're if that's not the case, if you're going and getting new donors, I 100% agree. Like if you could get 100% new donors and pay 90% to do it, 90% of revenue on the initial donation to do it, I would opt in for that every single day. Because if you start thinking about it in that way, your cost per donor acquisition in that model would probably be like 20 bucks. Well, donor is going to be worth far more to you over the course of a cycle than $20. So it makes all the sense in the world. But one of the examples I was I was just referencing, I mean, the donor acquisition cost for this client was $166. Their donor value the cycle before was $130. So they were adding something for $166 today that they didn't even get $100, I mean, they only got $130 the month, the cycle before. So it's like, I don't RevShares itself, like I think that I don't have a problem with RevShares. We use RevShares. We focus on RevShares, like we focus on though what percentage of the donors are we getting are new to file. And when we see that we go to a vendor, like pick any vendor that's in the market, when we see that we send them content and then they the donors that come in come back, and it's the majority of them we already have on the file, we we just stop using them. We move on to a different vendor that might have fresher data. I think the reason that that the RevShare industry, why it gets a bad rap, and it's not just it's not just me. Like I'm not the only one that isn't a huge fan of of how we do RevShares today. But the the reason why so many people are opposed to it and opposed to this model is because we don't follow the same model that direct mail uses, which when they do merge purges, like in direct mail, you go and do prospecting, if you're working with a reputable firm, they're gonna they're gonna match your house file to the file they're sending to you, they'll take out everybody you already own, and then you'll be sending to brand new prospects. I mean, that's what prospecting is. It's supposed to be going to new people, it's not supposed to be going to the the same old people. And if you go, or the same people you already own, and if you go and you look back like 10 years ago when RevShares were almost all uh, well, they were all email, uh, the the excuse we would always get from the Rev share vendors as to why they wouldn't do any kind of suppressions all had to do with inboxing. It's like if you suppress out the best people from our file, we're gonna be sending to not good people, and then eventually we're not gonna get into inboxes, you're not gonna raising money. I mean, that was a somewhat valid excuse. Like I it makes sense. Like, but in text messaging, there is no such excuse. There is no reason that you would have to be sending to people that a client already owns, like if you chose not to. Like we don't, when we do our own prospecting internally, we suppress out all of our clients' files. I mean, that's I mean, it ends up lowering the return that you get on that individual text, but we're not paying for something that they already owned. And I think that that to me is the that's where the to me the this becomes like the sticking point. It's not that you're paying a percentage of raised. I mean, I think like I said, if you're a man even at 100% Rev share, with an average donation being what, like $22, $25. I mean, it depends on, I guess, your content. But with such a low donation, if you paid 100% and you were getting 100% new, you'd have a really low donor acquisition cost and it would be great and be something that I think that everybody should do. Problem is that's not the case. And people aren't getting 100% new donors. Some people, if you have no file, you are. But as soon as you build a file, like if you're a committee, for instance, I would bet 75% or more of their files that they're getting off the Rev shares than they do, they already have. And like that's not uh there's reactivation benefits. I mean, I get there's like all these arguments people make me like I just don't yeah, people tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, but like sure. Like yeah, I mean you can make an excuse for anything, but they can they could also set up their own peer-to-peer arrangement, pay a penny a send, and reactivate the people they already own if they really chose to do that.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

But like I I think the two things that benefit folks from hitting the full files is are one, the reactivation benefits for sure. And two, again, going back to maybe they aren't opting into recurring and they will opt into recurring on prospecting. Where I do think that vendors are making uh uh insane decisions is when they're going 120% in some cases uh for their clients. What is the benefit of that? Uh, I don't understand that. We have no clients at all here that are uh over 99%. If you're if you're if anyone is listening to this and your vendor is sending at 120% on prospecting, you're getting ripped off. That is just a fact. Uh staying below it so that the point is that you don't have a loss, hence the Rev share, that's where you benefit, I think. It's the people that are going over that are really screwing up the rest of the industry.

SPEAKER_01 27:23

Yeah, I mean, I think that your point is where I mean there are people at like 200% that make it really hard for those of us that don't want to pay that much in order to get any kind of uh inventory. Um I I I mean, I have no problem. I mean, I would be happy if everybody would would do SIMs at 80% or 90%. I mean, that'd be the greatest thing in the world. I I think that where I have a kind of a slightly different view than you though, is to me, it has nothing to do with that ROI. Like the initial ROI is is a metric that is is important today, but six months from now doesn't make any difference. It is all about how much it's costing you to add someone to your file. If you're adding a good donor, if you're adding an actual legitimate donor, a donor that is your donor, like not like using one of these fake tactics or getting a stand with Israel mug or something that has nothing to do with you, but they're actually donating to you and your cause and you as a candidate, then you're going to get a second, third, fourth, fifth donation once they make their house file, once you make it onto the house file. You're gonna get recurring ID referenced, but you're also just gonna get additional house file donations. And if you can get that donation in at a reasonable cost, if you can get it in for less than uh $60, $50, if you can get that donor acquisition in, you're going to make money over the course of your program. The problem becomes, again, it goes back to even if you're in a 90% Rev share and 100% of the donors are already on your house file, your acquisition costs. I mean, there it it I mean, actually, then that there's no math to do that because your acquisition, you're there's no acquisition. So um, but let's you had one donation or one donor come in, your acquisition cost would be so high that you'd never actually recoup your money. Um and it it's comparing it again, though, back to a house file. Like your house file cost of fundraising ought to be incredibly low. Your house email file should be like 8%. Like maybe, maybe if you're not running a super efficient program, your your cost of fundraising on your house email program is 20%. Your house text program probably should be running below 40%. Compare that to RevShares, even the greatest Rev share, they're paying two or three times as much on text in order to get that donation in. So the goal should be, and this is all my opinions, but my I think the goal should be you focus as much as you can to get those people off of these prospecting lists onto your house file, and then you monetize them on your house file. Um, but I but again, that takes away the idea that um you're gonna run all of your fundraising just doing rev shares. But again, that rev shares aren't bad. It's just it's like how they're it's how they're applied. And I think too many people look at rev shares as that is their fundraising program. And I just fundamentally think that's that's short-sighted. Like you're rev shares are prospecting. And so that is prospecting. It should be put in a prospecting bucket, it should be treated separately. It yes, it'd be great if your prospecting runs at break-even, but if your prospecting has to lose a little money, there's no problem with that, assuming it is actually prospecting. And that as soon as somebody donates and get moved to your house file, and then you're monetizing the donor on your house file, and you actually run a competent house file program. That's how you get your cost of fundraising down is you move these things from from the RevShare market over into your house file. Um, and I do understand that there's the you're gonna see some recurring revenue come in from RevShares. Like you're gonna, I mean, you probably know better than me, but I assume it's for most folks, you're I mean, again, and it also depends on your copy. Are you like actually opting people in legitimately and telling them they're gonna become a monthly donor? Or are you saying, do you want to get less text messages? Keep this box checked if you want fewer text messages in the future, which is like totally again fraudulent. But nonetheless, um, I don't know that I disagree with you on on like overall on RevShares. Like I Rev shares are fine. They're a tactic. To me, the problem becomes when that becomes the fundraising program. If you're using them as a supplement to grow your file, which is what you referenced, I think that's a great way to do it. You're probably it's probably more cost efficient than going out and renting lists or doing lead generation or any of those things. It just becomes a problem when you go to some of the vendors that there's no way to get them to suppress your house file because they won't, or they'll steal your file. And then you end up just getting into this mindset of, okay, well, I'm not losing any money, so I'm just gonna keep running sins there. But that's really just causing you to lose revenue from your house file, which would be a lower cost of fundraising. But again, all of these things are it's all my opinion, but it's also pretty complicated. So it just kind of depends on how you want to set this up.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

It is complicated. Well, we only have 45 minutes, so we're at 30. So we'll we'll digress. Um what does the future look like for us, John? When we're talking about, you know, donation pages, peer-to-peer, some of this stuff. Um, I know we've had, again, private conversations about some of the stuff, but um curious your thoughts as we close it out here.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

I mean, I think the I think the presidential, this upcoming presidential campaign has a lot to do with determining what some of the the immediate future looks like. I mean, if we have a if we have one person running and uh just name, like if J.D. Bance decides to run and everyone gets behind him, I think it looks different than if we end up with a very competitive primary. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but I think that to kind of dictate like how the future looks is kind of dictated by the presidential primaries. And like I that is where we will have the ability to add more donors. I mean, it'd be great to think that like one of these congressional campaigns that that I'm working on or you're working on has the ability to drive a bunch of new donations. But the reality is they're not really probably going to find many new donors. The new donors have to be collected from a national campaign. And the presidential campaigns are the ones with the highest, uh, the highest uh attention. And so they're the ones that can can really drive new donor acquisition. And for from a party perspective, this isn't from like a specific movement perspective, but from an overarching party perspective, it probably would be good to have a lot of different candidates with different views, different points of view to go out to collect a bunch of new donors, bring them into the fold, and then when we get the nominee, everybody kind of coalesced under the nominee, and then we've built a bigger base. Whether that happens or not depends on like who all runs, like how the environment is and and all of those things. But I think that has a huge, a huge factor on like where we go as an industry. I do hope whoever ends up becoming the nominee has a very heavy hand in terms of protecting their candidate's name, making sure people aren't taking advantage of it and really trying to drive our party um future in a more more like ethical and sustainable way. Um, the other stuff you referenced, like, I I think like I'm I'm like, I don't know if that I'm accurate on this or not. Like I'm I'm certainly not no stradonist, but um I I just I believe that we are moving to a situation or or a future where the idea that you have to have donation pages probably isn't isn't there. Like that this is not, and I'm not saying this to to throw a shade at what Rad or anybody, but I just think the way technology is moving. Like, I mean you have open AI allowing you to buy shoes inside of Chat GPT, like I mean, you you can like as soon as we really do have the ability to collect donations really anywhere, the need for a page is I mean, there just is no need for a page. Um, if you look at the in the tech space, RCS I think has like a really great ability, if they ever enable it for political, to have a better experience for the donor, increase conversion rates, because you could have the donation occurring all inside of your text app. Like it would just be you'd open your app and you essentially could have like a mini donation page in the text as opposed to having to click out and go to a page. Um, from what I have heard, some of the brands that are using RCS that are that are testing some some um some like purchases inside of inside of it are seeing much higher conversion rates. They're seeing like it's doubling their their conversion rates. And so I would I would expect that we would see something like that in politics, assuming we have the ability to use RCS, which it sounds like maybe next election cycle, um it will be enabled, but it it it's it's it's pretty much dependent on Google to just say okay, because they control, they control all the standards to it. Um I think the same with email. There's some things in in email that's that you can you could essentially do the same thing. It's just a question of whether the email providers, the Gmails of the world, the AOLs of the world are gonna allow for for for it inside of their um in inside of their systems. And so that so anyway, so that not to not to digress too much, but but I think that the future does kind of look in terms of just getting money in, it's gonna look much different in that we're not going to, we probably won't have one unified place that everybody has to go in order to process a donation. Now, the donation still has to be processed somewhere, so it doesn't mean that there's not a place, there's not a need for um like the the platform. It's just it may not be going to an individual page. Right.

SPEAKER_00 36:39

Um apply to donate type of a thing where you know the payment processor is needed, but we're not actually taking people to a page. I mean, I feel like the sky's the limit on stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

Yeah, and I think, I mean, I I have thought a lot about if you go and think about how Instagram was, I mean, you might be too young to remember it's on immediate watch, but like you go back like 15 years ago. Um it's not been quite 15 years, but you go back like whatever it was 13 years ago when when Instagram first started, you would go and you'd collect all your friends, and then you just see all your friends' posts, and that's like all it was. And then they introduced advertising, and then you'd see your friends post and you'd see advertising. And then like through the years, it has developed to now you see more of, or at least me, I see less of my friends' posts on Instagram and more of everybody else's, but it's all dictated to what I want to see. I think that that is coming just generally to all marketing, not political marketing, but I mean it it's going to be more and more like that as the technology, the AI technology makes it onto our individual devices. Like when your AI can determine this is like what you want to see and kind of make those determinations for you and show you the information that is most relevant to you. The days of just broadcasting the same message to everybody is going to be gone because it's not going to have any relevance to everyone. Like this check thing could very well have like never even made it through to anyone. And it's not any kind of censorship, it's you making personal decisions on what you're looking at and not looking at on your phone and enabling your phone to help you make the decision as to what you see and don't see. Um and I think that that that is that is certainly going to come at some point. And like people joke, it's going to be my AI agent talking to your AI agent. Um, and it it kind of it sounds crazy, but I actually do think that is where we are, we are headed. And the people who figure out how to create content that speaks to the audience they're trying to reach is going to be the the organizations that are incredibly successful. And the folks doing scammy stuff that are just trying to do like brute force marketing are probably gonna not be successful. But whether that's next, it's it's probably not next cycle, but whether that's like two cycles or four cycles or 30 years from now is it just kind of depends on how fast the technology um develops and and how the phone manufacturers want to integrate AI into their phones. But um it could very well change how we how we look at things.

SPEAKER_00 39:11

For the record, I'm old enough to remember when Instagram would only show you 10 or less likes and show you all the usernames that you had to hit 11 likes to get the actual 11 likes onto your photo. And that was uh that was a very big deal. That was a very big deal.

SPEAKER_01 39:24

I forgot about that. That's like that that has been a long time ago, though.

SPEAKER_00 39:29

You were not cool unless you had 11 likes or more, period.

SPEAKER_01 39:32

Yeah, I never had 11 likes. Nobody ever wanted to see my son. I had like three friends, so the maximum I could get was three.

SPEAKER_00 39:40

Thank God for the algorithms. All right, rapid fire. Um who do you hear the most about from your tweets?

SPEAKER_01 39:50

I mean, usually I hear from people that agree with me. Like this is the time it's like these consultants who it's like a bunch of people who won't ever like and they get so annoyed because I'm like, why are you texting me this? Why do you text me my tweet and say you appreciate it? Like, like it, like it, retweet. Like you could help me with getting some views on this. And like, but I mean that is usually the most often response. I don't ever have anybody reach out and say they don't agree. That doesn't mean people don't agree, but the people who don't agree don't ever say anything. They just like ignore it or or they've already blocked me, so they don't even see my they don't even see anything I put out.

SPEAKER_00 40:24

You gotta get a burner phone, man. All right. Magic wand. What are you changing tomorrow in the industry?

SPEAKER_01 40:30

I am changing the how people view success. Like I'm making it so it's all about lifetime value, it's all about how much you net a program. I'm changing, I'm getting rid of the like all the vanity metrics, like focusing on gross revenue. Um, and that cleans up, I think, a lot of these things.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

Love the term vanity metrics. Uh favorite race you've worked on? In life. In life.

SPEAKER_01 40:56

Um, well, I was um, I'm gonna throw way back, I was Mike DeWine's campaign manager when he ran for attorney general in 2010. So I have to say that because it was where I was most um, I was most although I don't really wasn't really in control, but I will pretend like I was most in control. And um so I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go with Mike DeWine.

SPEAKER_00 41:20

That's a good one. Uh, last rapid fire. If you were not doing digital or working in politics, what would you be doing?

SPEAKER_01 41:27

I'd probably be in the landscaping industry or the or the like the um golf, like like a golf course superintendent or something like that. My entire family, that's like what we did growing up. Like my first job, I cut grass. Like that's what I did from the time I was 11 years old until I finished graduate school. I cut grass, cut people's lawns, I did landscaping, and somehow I took a terrible career change and decided politics would be what I would focus on. And so um if I if I was still able to work out in the heat, that is what I would do. But now I'm soft and I like sitting behind a computer.

SPEAKER_00 42:04

Yeah, I did eight hours of yard work on Saturday and I couldn't move all of Sunday. It I I'm not cut out. I also have a dandelion problem in my yard. So if you want to stop by, let me know.

SPEAKER_01 42:12

Yeah, you need to. I think they call, I think there's some a chemical called merit. You just spray. Like I think it's like it's uh that dandelions are pretty easy to get rid of.

SPEAKER_00 42:20

So not when your wife is part of the Maha movement, John. Very difficult. Very difficult. Just don't tell her. Just don't don't don't uh don't don't mention.

SPEAKER_01 42:31

I mean, you can also go pull them, but pulling dandelions is tough. They got like a root that so you gotta get it all.

SPEAKER_00 42:36

It's very tough. Not easy. John, thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate uh all of your insight here. Where can the people follow you to see your unhinged ext posts?

SPEAKER_01 42:47

I don't really post much that anymore, but you can always go to John K at John K. Hall. Uh you can also go to my website, John Hall Strategies.com, which is where I have some medium posts. So I've been kind of lazy recently and I haven't really done anything. Nobody, nobody really cares. So like I kind of have lost a little bit of faith for the moment. And so, but eventually I'll post some more and so people can go find me, find me there. Also, if you like something, click like. Don't just text me. If you text me, it's gonna annoy me. Just like it, and then I'll know you like it.

unknown 43:20

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 43:20

Likes on X are private now. Come on, guys, step it up. I mean, I don't even know what that means, but okay. No one could see it. If you like the post on X, people can't see it now. Um I can see it though, right? You can see it, yes, but the public can't.

SPEAKER_01 43:32

Yeah, so like, yeah, more people ought to be liking. More people ought to be liking it so that like I know. Like that it did. I'm guessing it helps the algorithm in some way. I can't I used to get a lot of engagement on on on X when it used to be Twitter, and like I get none anymore. And I think it's I don't do it enough or something, but um but anyway, that's how they can find me. Thank you for having me. I appreciate talking to you. Like I said earlier, I think you're doing uh I think you you're you do great work. You're doing some great work. Let me know. Anyone can let me know if I could be helpful. If I can ever be helpful to you, you let me know too.

SPEAKER_00 44:04

Thank you, John. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate uh you giving us all the insight. And thank you guys for listening to the Digital Politics Podcast. If you like what you heard, share it with your friends. Be sure to like, follow, subscribe to the show. That's going to do it for us. We will be back in June for episode eight.