Budgeting
Audit Your Voter Contact Budget
How to calculate the share of spend that reached a voter, where the rest usually went, and why most campaigns cannot tell you their number.
By Nathan Spalding. Published .
Ask a campaign treasurer what share of the money reached a voter and you will usually get a pause, then a guess. The guess is almost always high. This is the one calculation we run on every campaign we review, and it is the one we would run on yours first. It takes an hour with the final finance report.
What counts as voter contact
Direct voter contact is money that puts the campaign's message in front of a specific voter: mail, digital advertising, texting, phone programs, door literature, and paid canvass. Broadcast and cable count when they are bought against a voter universe rather than a market; for most county races they are not, so we leave them out.
What does not count: consulting and staff, events and food, yard signs and banners, the office, the website and software, compliance and accounting, travel, and the fundraising cost of raising the money. Some of that is necessary. None of it is contact. Signs are the one people argue about, and we are firm on it: a sign tells people you exist, it does not ask anyone for a vote.
The calculation
Pull the categories from the final report filed with your state or the FEC, not from memory and not from the budget you wrote in March. Add up the contact lines. Divide by total spend. Write the percentage down.
Here is what that looks like on a composite budget for a contested county race. The numbers are illustrative, built from the proportions we see in races at this level, and they are not any one client's report.
62 percent
direct voter contact share, on a composite county-race budget of $85,000
| Category | Spend | Reached a voter |
|---|---|---|
| $28,000 | Yes | |
| Digital ads | $12,000 | Yes |
| Signs and banners | $9,000 | No |
| Consulting | $10,000 | No |
| Events | $7,000 | No |
| Texting | $6,000 | Yes |
| Door literature | $4,000 | Yes |
| Phones | $3,000 | Yes |
| Compliance and accounting | $3,000 | No |
| Website and software | $2,000 | No |
| Travel and misc. | $1,000 | No |
| Paid canvass | $0 | Yes |
Contact lines total $53,000. Divided by $85,000 that is 62 percent. If this were a real review, the next question would be the $9,000 in signs and the $7,000 in events, which together are more than the texting, literature, and phone programs combined.
Reviewing the result
The number by itself is a diagnosis, not a verdict. Three things to do with it.
Compare it with the target you set at the start. If you had no target, that is the finding: the campaign never decided what the money was for.
List every line over five percent of the budget and ask of each one whether it reached a voter. The lines that did not are where the next campaign's money comes from.
Look at the calendar. What share of total spend landed in the last thirty days, and was it contact? A campaign that spent its contact money early and its last month on an election-night party has the shape backwards.
Then do the same for the top of ticket in your county, from their reports. You will learn more about why your race went the way it did from their mail schedule than from anything a consultant tells you.
About the 80 percent target
We hold our own campaigns to 80 percent or more on direct voter contact, and we got there by refusing lines that other campaigns treat as fixed costs. It is a hard target and it forces fights with vendors and sometimes with the candidate. We publish it because people ask, not because we think a sheriff's race in another state has to match it. Set your own number before the first dollar comes in, and run this calculation against it when the last one goes out.
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