How to Finance a Political Campaign

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jim Goettler on behalf of Expert Village and this is a video series about managing a political campaign. Now obviously, I'm trying to crunch an awful lot of information into a very short series for this project so keep, bear in mind I'm not going to try and cover everything there is to know about a campaign. That said, this segment is going to be about the finances for a campaign and I'm mainly focusing on state and regional efforts as opposed to federal campaigns for reasons I'll get into in the next segment. Finances can usually be tracked, in other words, if you're trying to figure out what a campaign is going to cost, one of the easiest ways to do that is by tracking other campaigns for a similar office that happened in prior years. This is all going to be public record, it's going to be available through your Secretary of State's office, through your public disclosure commissions. It may take a little bit of digging. It's all on the web, as a rule, and you can see what a campaign costs say three years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. And with that basic bit of information, you'll get a ballpark amount of what it's going to cost to run the campaign that you are planning to put together. State or local campaigns obviously don't cost near as much because you're not talking about as many people. Most campaign finance reporting requirements have it very detailed, spelled out. Easily accessible. You can find what they cost, what they spent for printing, what they spent for signage, what they spent for hotels, what they spent for car rentals, etc., etc. All these details are public record. It may take some digging but you are going to be able to establish a budget for your campaign that will allow you to get off on a good foot and not stumble around, trying to make up numbers on the fly. So I strong suggest that you look at the history of the office you're dealing with or the initiative campaign you're dealing with. Initiative campaigns are generally statewide. There is going to be a financial record available to you at the state level. You simply have to dig around through the offices and find out where that information is. It will tell you what other initiatives, successful initiatives cost to both get on the ballot and to prevail. The next segment I'm going to touch on briefly is the very important need for a financial compliance person, or someone very conversant with finances for your campaign. Thanks."