The goldmine at Labour’s feet?

What if the the Labour Party had a possible income stream of millions at its feet, that it wasn’t making the most of in spite of its financial difficulties? Surely that would be madness – but this may be what is happening.

Although mass-fundraising itself is a skill that is best executed by well-trained professionals, the basics are not difficult to understand. The first step of the main underlying strategy is to collect the data of as many people as possible who could be described as potential donors or prospects.

These are then nurtured through a series of communications, until the moment is right to ask for a donation. The first ask may be quite small – let’s say £2. This is as much about finding out who is interested in giving, as much as actual fundraising.

After further cultivation, another ask is made – perhaps a standing order. As donors are nurtured up the giving scale, fewer and fewer will be persuaded to give bigger and bigger sums, creating a ‘pyramid structure’ – a few very large donors at the top, and a mass of smaller donors at the bottom. Generally for a well-run charity, 20 per cent of donors will give 80 per cent of any individual contributor donor income.

Data collection, donor cultivation, ask and repeat – that’s it. Charities invest a lot of time in the first part of the process, data collection. Have you ever been stopped in the street by a charity representative asking you for your details? Have you ever attended a charity event in a friend’s home, like Macmillan’s Coffee Morning, or been asked to wear Jeans for Genes? Have you ever been redirected to a data collection page after giving an online donation. A charity was trying to collect your data, and so start the process of nurturing.

The odd thing is, while charities spend millions on data collection, the Labour Party has thousands of volunteers who do this for free. Voter identification, the heart of the week to week activities for many CLPs, creates a record of hundreds of thousands of supporters – and potential donors.

And this is true even in so-called “no-hope” areas for Labour. Even if many wards throughout the country are far too wealthy to ever return a Labour representative, the party often polls hundreds of votes: supporters who in time would, in some cases, be happy to donate time and money to the party.

The realisation that voter ID is also potential donor ID should act as a more practical spur to Labour activity in less promising areas, to back up more idealistic ‘One Nation’ talk. However, if that is unrealistic for now, surely at least the party should be wealth screening its membership and its voter ID  data from wealthier areas.

This may be going on already. However, given the amount of data involved, if it was being done properly with the necessary nurturing happening as a consequence, it is hard to see how a the party could fail to raise much more money than it is currently doing as a result.

After all, for example, in 2011 Amnesty International managed to raise £16.5 million from approximate 750,000 ‘supporters’ – a term its annual report does not define (or is explicit about – but apparently 38,000 represents 5% of all supporters), but seems to be made up in the main by non-members. Labour should be doing better given that 8.5 million people voted for the party at the last election.

If such wealth screening was to occur, and fundraising action a taken as a result, a protocol for co-ordinating with local CLPs would have to be worked out. Many may be alarmed at first at such a professional attitude to data, and so any new methods used by the party would have to be preceded by building support in the professional and voluntary party

But currently the Labour Party is doing a big chunk of ‘the hard bit’ of fundraising without even any additional effort on top of its traditional activities, and may not taking advantage of it.