An honest request

By Ezra Levin, Indivisible co-founder

Today, I want to pull the curtain back a bit on our fundraising and budgeting process, so you understand just how important grassroots donors, like you, are to Indivisible.

How budgeting and planning works for us.

Because Indivisible’s largest single source of support is grassroots donations, there’s always a big question-mark hovering over our plans. That’s because small dollar giving is heavily event-driven. It spikes in moments of crisis or outrage; it goes flat in moments of malaise. We can’t predict the future, so we never totally know what the coming year holds for our fundraising.

At the same time, we have to plan. And so every fall, we put together our best estimate of what we’ll raise next year. And then we use that estimate to make hard choices about how much we can spend. I can’t stress this enough: we do our best work when we plan ahead. Planning ahead means we can hire staff to work on the ground in battleground states, we can get money out to local and statewide Indivisible groups, and we can set up a kickass voter contact operation for election years.

Planning for the end game of this election.

This has been a really weird year for fundraising. Frankly, for a lot of this year, a lot of people were depressed. That was pretty reasonable! But depressed people don’t tend to hit the donate button. So the result was, we fell short of our fundraising goals — repeatedly. That’s not just Indivisible — it’s been true for a lot of our partners too.

Now, with just over a week to go before the election, the situation has changed dramatically. Democrats got their act together and enacted a kickass agenda — from climate to prescription drugs to student debt to weed. We’ve got our mojo back and we’re going on offense against MAGA extremism around the country.

But at the same time, those lost fundraising months from earlier in the year hurt. It means as we’re making our final decisions on Indivisible’s voter contact operation and how much support we can offer candidates, we’re constrained. Right now we’ve got tons of volunteer energy, but we don’t have the budget to match it (all those postcards, calls, texts, and other volunteer support opportunities cost money!). There are several tossup House races I’d like to add to our voter contact plan for the next 9 days — but we can’t do that if we don’t bring in more.

Every dollar we take in now goes directly into the field. We’re doing our damnedest to hold the House, expand the Senate, and make Mitch McConnell, Kyrsten Sinema, and Joe Manchin politically irrelevant next year. That’s the opportunity in front of us, and we will use every resource available to us to achieve that between now and November 8.

That’s where you come in. We really need you in these final days before the election. Can you donate $38 to help us crush our GOTV goals? I’d also welcome you forwarding this email to friends/family/supporters who you think share our goals. At this stage of the campaign, we’re casting as wide a net as possible.

If you’d like to help without donating, click here to find all of our upcoming virtual voter contact events and help us phonebank and textbank to get out the vote. We believe we can save our democracy from the MAGAs. We believe there are more of us than there are of them. Together, we will win.