We need money.
In order to accomplish the bare minimum of our GOTV we need about $3,000.
Why so high? Signs.
Unlike other election years due to various circumstances including the supply chain crisis signs were especially hard to get.
Campaigns no longer just hand over dozens of signs to county parties to get out the vote. It's up to us individual county parties to get the signs.
This ranges from us county chairs ordering bulk signs from the campaigns such as the Beto campaign, to ordering signs from other groups or other county chairs who had signs made up, or even contracting with printers ourselves to create signs either with the design mockups from the campaigns or creating one ourselves.
This is going to be policy moving forward as well. So we should prepare for this in 2024 as well.
Overall, this all takes hundreds of dollars and for tiny rural Democratic Parties like our own this is really hurting us.
We desperately need money in order to get signs. It takes 10 days for signs to ship. From ordering to arrival may be as much as 2 weeks. So we need to get our stuff ordered before October 1st at the latest.
Right now we have spent:
$387 for 100 Beto yard signs plus shipping. We now have 83 of these signs left. Club members get up to 2 free because a Club member is donating $500 for Beto signs. We are selling the signs for $5 each.
$240 for 40 3-person yard signs that list our top 3 state candidates: Beto, Collier, & Garza. This was a sign created by the Atascosa Democratic Party We have 34 of these left. We are selling them for $7 each.
$132 for 6 4x6 Beto highway signs. We have no more of these and need 12 more of these for our polling locations. We also have members who want some of their own.
Forthcoming admin expenses:
In September and October we have the yearly cost for the website, the newsletter, the post office box and so forth. I and the club are covering it so far but that's about $600.
Forthcoming sign expenses:
As I said, we need at least 12 more of the Beto highway signs just for our polling locations. Several members have also shown interest in buying such signs for themselves from us as well. And including some highway areas we want to target we probably need to get about 20 more that's nearly $500.
A county chair is in the process of contracting with a printer to create a 4x4 signs that will list ALL of our state candidates and another one for the judicial candidates. We definitely want at least 12 of each of those signs for our polling locations. That's about $600.
If we are able to give/sell our 83 Beto yard signs before October 1st we are going to order another 100 that's another $387 including shipping.
There are also upcoming texting expenses:
Sisters United is a group that helps turnout women (and their families) to vote. They have shown consistently to increase voter turnout by 25%.
Unlike our neighboring counties (Aransas, Victoria, Lavaca, Bee, etc) Texas Democratic Party will not pay Sister United to do targeted voter outreach so we need to cover the cost ourselves. It will be about $600. We need to have them paid by mid September to join the program. So that's in about 2 weeks.
I have also been in the works to set up our own text bank to reach out to every voter in the county with a mobile phone number listed in VAN (TDP's voter action network which is our registered voter database for the party).
I am working with Kirk Pate from Blue Up Coalition who is working with Scale to Win/Spoke to help us tailor our texting campaigns to achieve our goals of identifying voters (if they are Dems or not or wiling to vote for Dems this cycle), remind them of early voting, election day polling locations, and do it as cheaply as possible.
We think we can do this for less than $300 for everything but it is a pay as you go set up depending on the texts sent so it could be more than that. I had to delay setting this up by a month for a combination of needing to get certification for 10DLC (new texting guidelines since 2020) which is $95, getting an EIN and set up a new non-profit bank account in order to set up the Spoke account since they prefer bank account direct deposits vs credit card or checks, and of course the preparation for our Environmental Issues Forum which I think we did really good on.
It took over 2 weeks for the IRS to send me the EIN and thus had to wait to set up the bank account.
So we are a bit behind. But since we have only about 13,000 registered voters it won't be a big deal since it will take about a week or less to send the initial texts for the first campaign and I can do that all by myself.
The initial voter identification campaigns will be the biggest and most expensive campaign but we NEED it to update VAN records and help us reach Democrats and Democratic leaning voters while weeding out the Republicans.
That will definitely be done by end of September.
The last 2 campaigns will only be directed towards people we think will vote for Democrats and it will be the fastest and cheapest campaigns.
Then the next campaign will be right before Early Voting starts on October 24th.
The last campaign texts will be sent on Monday November 7th about where to vote on election day.
Time is of the essence so donations for these GOTV initiatives of ours will be going to the new bank account for the Calhoun County Democratic Party so send checks to:
Calhoun County Democratic Party
C/O Brandelyn Wiser
P.O. Box 1012
Port Lavaca, TX 77979
Or you can call or text me to pick up checks or you can bring them to our next meeting at the Calhoun County Public Library in Port Lavaca on Tuesday September 6, 2022 at 6pm (Social/Potluck at 5.30pm).
I know money is tight but I also know over $13,000 was donated from Democrats in our county to various Democratic groups in the state and nation in the past year and we could do a lot with just a fraction of that money.
Even $5 or $10 recurring donations on our ActBlue account every month or bringing checks to our monthly meetings can really add up and help us enormously.
We have 83 of these left. For non-club members it is $5 each.
We have 34 of these left. $7 each.
We are in the process of ordering more 4x6 Beto signs but need money. They cost $22 to be made and shipped to us. We haven't decided on a sale price as we are distributing them ourselves around town.
If you want more signs around the county then donate to us!
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