Building Your Donor List in 10 Minutes: Rolodexing for the Modern Era

Every campaign's first donors are already sitting in the candidate's phone, email, and social media contacts, they just haven't been organized yet. This microlearning walks through the process of building a donor list (sometimes called "rolodexing") by collecting, cleaning, and prioritizing a candidate's personal network to kickstart fundraising from day one.

You'll follow a 5-step process: collect contacts from every source (phones, email, social media, alumni lists, and more), consolidate them into one spreadsheet, remove duplicates, clean up the data, and upload it to a donor database if your campaign uses one. From there, you'll learn how to rank contacts by giving capacity and likelihood to contribute, so the campaign knows who gets a personal phone call and who gets a mass email, plus how to catch implicit bias that can cause staff to underestimate a donor's capacity.

Finish in about ten minutes, then use the linked donor list template, ranking worksheet, and contact export guide to build your list right away.