metrics
- 16M
- Emails Sent
- 90K+
- Supporters Recruited
- $2M
- Fundraised
The Stein campaign announced her bid for the U.S. presidency as a Green Party candidate one year prior to the November 2024 Election. The complexities of running as a third party candidate were not new challenges for her or her team and they were ready for what was ahead. Her campaign team prioritized grassroots strategies to engage and educate voters and secure ballot access across the nation, and while she didn’t win the presidency, Dr. Stein achieved the highest vote total of any third party candidate.
To get a better understanding of how the Stein team pulled this off, we sat down with Fundraising Director Georgia Davenport, who shared more about how they connected with voters, raised funds, and gained access to the ballot in a majority of states even without the infrastructure of a major party behind them.
Georgia shared that the first step was growing from their existing base of 25,000 opted-in supporters and mobilizing their most active leaders to reach more voters. In collaboration with NationBuilder Architect Chuckwalla Design, they crafted a website that would capture the attention of voters and offer easy ways for them to get involved. The team focused on automating email outreach wherever they could to ensure messages reached voters at the right time, while also gathering valuable data to better understand the most engaged demographics.
One of the main focuses of the campaign was to increase media exposure through both social and traditional media. They leveraged NationBuilder petition pages for two campaigns, “Tell Meta to stop censoring Jill on Instagram” and “Let the Candidates Debate,” where they were able to gain traction and sign up new supporters.
Another key area was fundraising and making the donation process transparent, accessible, and directly connected to the tangible impact of voters' contributions. NationBuilder Payments gave the Stein campaign a way to both collect donations and tie those donations back to the holistic engagement the campaign had with each supporter.
Drawing on that rich engagement history, the Stein campaign tailored their outreach approach based on factors like previous donation history, specific supporters’ interests, and level of involvement. Over the course of the 2024 cycle, they sent out over 16 million emails, analyzing open and click-through data regularly to identify the topics that motivated supporters the most and refine their targeting.
“NationBuilder’s platform made it possible to hone in on who has donated, what amount, in what state, and then filter through them. We could filter to find 100 donors who donated $200 or less in Arizona. If we wanted to get them to $250, we could send them a personalized email with how much more money they could donate to qualify us for matching funds.”
- Georgia Davenport, Fundraising Director for Jill Stein
The campaign encouraged voters to bring ideas directly to them. In the final months of the election, voters inspired a new initiative to have Dr. Stein’s campaign advertisements up on billboards. The effort focused on cities and counties with high expected turnout in states where the campaign had secured ballot access. And their supporters’ enthusiasm for this push meant that it was a boon to fundraising, too, driving $80,000 in donations in a span of just weeks.
“A lot of voters had been saying they wanted to see this happen, so we needed to make it happen. Listening to what your supporters are wanting to see and willing to donate to was really important.”
- Georgia Davenport, Fundraising Director for Jill Stein
This people-centric organizing focus ultimately resulted in $2 million dollars raised, surpassing not just Dr. Stein’s previous campaigns’ fundraising results, but also those of all other third-party competitors who were still in the race on election day. And just as impressively, the campaign grew its coalition of supporters by more than 250% over the course of the election cycle.
Even with a much smaller team than the major-party candidates, the campaign was able to build the foundation necessary to tackle the challenges of pursuing matching funds and securing ballot access.. The results speak for themselves, as Dr. Stein successfully cleared the thresholds both for federal matching funds and for access to 39 of 50 state ballots. And while the 2024 presidential election may be over, the Stein campaign is proof that with the right tools and the right approach, the ceiling for third-party candidates is higher than it has ever been.
