Whether you’re a local politician or running for president, all campaigns are contingent on pulling from various aspects to effectively manage donors, donations, and outreach in order to foster good relationships with constituents. Often times, doing the small things—like sending donors thank-you notes—can make a huge difference in the success of the campaign. In short, running a political campaign takes a lot of time and effort. And as you might imagine, having a lot of people donate to your campaign can make your job even harder. Fortunately, this Political Campaign Contributions template can help. Here are a few of the template’s features and highlights, by table:

Contacts

Contacts are the source of donations, so it makes sense to make them the main point of focus in your template. Contacts can be composed of both individuals and companies, and are uniquely identified by a combination of their name, address, phone number, and emails. This table also tracks the lifetime amount of donations made by campaign contacts, and links to both the Donations table and the Channels table.

Fields

• Name. The name of the contact. Since a contact can either be an individual person or a company, this field can be composed of both.
• Entity type. This single select field allows you to select if the contact/donor is an individual person or a company.
• Image. Depending on the entity type, this field is a great place to store a friendly photo of an individual, or the logo of the company if the contact is a business entity.
• Party. The contact’s political party affiliation.
• Street address. The contact’s street address line.
• City. The contact’s city.
• State. The contact’s state.
• Zip code. The contact’s zip code.
• Phone. The contact’s phone number. Not only is it necessary for donation calls, but also thank-you calls!
• Email. The contact’s email. Similarly to phone number, email is a critical outlet in maintaining healthy relationships with your donors/constituents.
• Donations. This is a linked field to the Donations table, which allows you to link each contact with their respective donation(s).
• Lifetime. The lifetime donation amount for the contact. This formula takes into consideration all donations, regardless of time period. It then sums up this amount to provide a lifetime total for the contact. As new donations are processed, this amount will increase.
• Preferred channel. This is a linked field to the Channels table, which allows you to link the channel that the contact prefers with regards to communications and/or donations, depending on your use case.

Views

• All contacts. Displays all contacts, sorted in alphabetical order by name.
• Individuals. Displays individuals, sorted by lifetime donation amount from highest to lowest.
• Companies. Displays only businesses, sorted by lifetime donation amount from highest to lowest.
• By party. Displays all contacts in a kanban view, stacked by party affiliation.

Donations

Donations and donors go hand-in-hand. After all, there are no donations without donors. The goal of this table is to keep a running list of all donations that are made, as well as important information like the entity who donated, the amount donated, and when the donation was made. The table also comes with a field designated to keep track of whether thank-you notes have been sent to donors based on each specific donation.

Fields

• GUID. This field stands for Global Unique Identifier, which is a fancy way of saying that the content in this field is strictly unique and does not appear anywhere else in the database. When transactions are made, they have unique identifiers, or GUIDs, that help identify other properties related to the transaction itself.
• Donor. This is a linked field to the Contacts table, which is critical in matching up each transaction with its respective donor.
• Amount. The dollar amount of the specific transaction.
• Date. The date the donation (transaction) took place.
• TY note sent. Thanking constituents for their donations is imperative in fostering a good relationship with them. This field allows you to toggle whether a thank-you note has been sent or not.
• Fund allocation. Indicates where the use of the funds, what they were used for. It is a multi-select field because often times funds are allocated to multiple resources.

Views

• All donations. Displays all donations, sorted by the donation date from oldest to most recent.
• High value. Displays all donations larger than 3000, sorted in descending order from largest to smallest. Of course, this threshold can be changed to your liking.
• Internal funding. Displays all donations whose funds were allocated towards organizer salaries, marketing, or the website. This view is sorted by the donation date from oldest to most recent.
• Charity. Displays all donations that were used for charities sorted by the donation date from oldest to most recent.

Channels

Distribution and determining the most effective outreach channels is a huge part of a successful campaign. This table allows you to keep track of those channels, together with your constituents, to act on and refine your campaign outreach strategy.

Fields

• Name. The name of the outreach channel.
• Notes. A place for the channel’s description, notes, and thoughts.
• Contacts. This is a linked field to the Contacts table. The field allows you to see which contacts have a preferred or most effective channel when it comes to campaign/donation outreach. While not all contacts may have a preference, it’s good to make a note of those that do, so that your outreach is impactful and allows your constituents to contribute in the way that they want to.

Views

• All channels. Displays all channels without any sorting or filtering.