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. 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 singe database. 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 good email list from consolidating all their data, Team Inslee could now focus on executing campaigns that helped them build their database of supporters. With the BlueUtopia system, every interaction is automatically stored in a single system. They began with town halls, online petitions, and 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 no 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 professionally designed and 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 Governors race began 2011, online had become a principle source of campaign funding.

With BlueUtopia, every interaction -- both online and offline -- is integrated into a single system. 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.