The resurgence of email list acquisition raises several concerns for political campaigns. | Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesCal Cunningham’s North Carolina Senate bid ended with a disappointing loss. But the Democrat left the 2020 campaign with a valuable asset after raising $51 million: his fundraising email list.
That list now belongs to Avalanche, an email acquisition service founded by Mike Nellis, a Democratic digital strategist who was a senior adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
Companies and groups like Avalanche are popping up to fill the gaping hole left by Facebook and Google’s, which bar campaigns and political groups from running ads on their platforms to draw in small-dollar donors. By cutting off that pipeline to voters and potential supporters, the tech giants have set off a race to find new ways to reach those contributors, according to interviews with more than a dozen digital strategists.
“List buys skyrocketed as a percent of total [email] acquisition spending in 2020, and with Facebook and Google still locking us out, I expect it will take up an even larger share of the market this cycle,” said Nellis, who also leads Authentic Campaigns, a digital firm that is a separate company from Avalanche. “Back in 2012, we had two election cycles as evidence for how digital fundraising for political campaigns played out.
The resurgence of email list acquisition raises several concerns for political campaigns, strategists acknowledged. Since the practice relies on using preexisting donor lists others have already built, the same pool of small-dollar donors ends up getting a growing number of emails from different campaigns, raising the risk of donor fatigue. Campaigns renting lists are more likely to see their emails get caught in spam filters, lowering their worth.