We’re less than two months from the election. It’s definitely crunch time, and the need for resources has never been more critical. Our answer? Weekly recurring. It’s a great tool that helps campaigns and committees bring in more donations during these tough last few weeks when the pressure is really on.
Just as it sounds, weekly recurring gives donors the option to sign up and make a recurring contribution that processes on the same day of the week, every week, until November 8th. After Election Day, the recurring contribution automatically deactivates.
It’s important to note that we can only turn weekly recurring on for your forms if you’re using ActBlue to fundraise for both your emails and website.
Here’s what your donors will see when you’ve got weekly recurring turned on for a form:
So if a donor signed up with a recurring contribution today, they’d be making 7 contributions that would each be scheduled to process on Thursday. If you’re interested in turning on weekly recurring, shoot us an email at info [AT] actblue [DOT] com with the forms you want it turned on for. If you decide you want to use it on more forms in the future, you can just clone a form that already has weekly enabled.
Don’t forget that you can use pop-up recurring for weekly contributions! But make sure you change the ask language and note that it’s a weekly recurring contribution.
When you’re creating your links, you can add a parameter (recur_weekly=yes) that sets the form to weekly. It looks like this:
https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/form_name?amount=10&recur_weekly=yes&refcode=weekly
We recommend you update your receipt text for weekly contribution forms. You’ll find the space to do that within the Edit tab of your forms:
We also recommend putting some time into figuring out how to make the right asks of the right folks. When we’ve tested our weekly recurring feature, we’ve found that people who are more likely to sign up for our usual monthly recurring ask are also more likely to give weekly. Conversely, folks who are more likely to give to a one-time ask are less likely to give on a weekly basis.
Another test we had great success with was our ‘7 for 7’ ask, where we asked donors to give $7 for the last 7 weeks before the election. But it’s important to remember that every list is different.
Weekly recurring is a great way to keep your donor base engaged with you up until when it really counts: Election Day. We’re thrilled to bring you this option again, and would love to hear about any tests you run that are particularly successful. If we’ve convinced you to get set up with weekly recurring, let us know at info [AT] actblue [DOT] com and we’ll turn it on.
Best of luck!
