How Jay Inslee scaled his campaign from 1500 supporters to 88,000 using BlueUtopia

Jay Inslee was still a Congressman in Washington's 1st district when his team wanted to start looking to the future. They wanted to aggressively build a much larger audience and they wanted their supporters to be much more involved with the campaign. However, with a database system that nearly no one could use, they had collected very little data on their supporters. And what they did have was largely scattered in spreadsheets.

First, they needed to consolidate around one system that could help with and capture data from the traditional activities but also the growing online efforts. They chose BlueUtopia and were able to quickly consolidate lists into a single system. Everything that had been stored in old systems -- Excel sheets, email accounts, previous donor lists, event attendee sheets -- everything was consolidated into a single system. That was a critical first step but what was also key was that now everyone on the team was using and adding value to the same data.

Armed with a single good quality email list, Team Inslee could now focus on executing campaigns that helped them build their database of supporters. With BlueUtopia, every interaction is automatically stored in a single system. Team Inslee began with town halls, online petitions, and they sent out a regular email with high-value content. With event RSVP's, email signups, small donors, and even inquiries to the campaign all going into the database, their email list went from 1500 to over 12,000 in just a single election cycle.

The Inslee campaign was an early adopter of technology. As early as 2004, they had tried to raise money online. Unfortunately, they were having very little success. With the new BlueUtopia system however, many things changed: online traffic had now grown significantly, email outreach was way up, and their online donation system was now optimized for high completion rates. Online contributions, which were virtually non-existent in prior years, instantly jumped to 8% of total funds and by the time the Governor's race began 2011, online had become a principle source of campaign fundraising.

With BlueUtopia, every interaction -- both online and offline -- is integrated into a single system, largely automatically. Event attendees checked in and were signed up for the email list, which was feeding into the online fundraising, which was then building the pipeline of Jay Inslee's personal calls. Over the course of 2 campaign cycles the Inslee campaign's list of supporters, which started at just 1500, had grown to over 40,000. Two cycles later, when the gubernatorial campaign started, they had 88,000 supporter records -- a nearly 60-fold increase.