Time to push the envelope. The donation envelope that is. RPAC is the life of the real estate industry because it raises money to support political initiatives to protect private property rights for homeowners.
I’ve seen auctions, talent shows, and fundraising events all that have brought in a substantial amount of money to support the cause. The problem is that they require a significant amount of time, money, and energy to facilitate.
We can take the resources you already and use them to help you reach your goal except you have to think differently and put together an implementation plan to make it happen. Before your lizard brain seeps in to say, “We can’t do that” or “It won’t work in my market” have a conversation with your RPAC chair and communications/marketing department to see it can be done.
Video sales letters
A video sales letter is a web page that contains an attention grabber, headline, sub-headline, video, and button image linking to payment gateway system to accept donations. Because RPAC is a political donation only REALTOR members can contribute by logging into the password protected system.
Couple tips:
- Make sure video sales letter page is mobile friendly.
- Make sure payment page is mobile friendly.
- Auto-play the video
Use this as an example:
- Attention grabber – Attention REALTORS who want to protect their clients
- Headline – Help Clients Avoid Paying 3% Transfer Tax Now!
- Subheadline – The best investment to secure the future of real estate transactions
- Watch this video to consider another reason to invest
- Button linking to payment gateway
All of these would go into a web page either hosting on the association domain or it’s own unique URL.
Attention REALTORS who want to protect their clients
Help Clients Avoid Paying 3% Transfer Tax Now!
The best investment to secure the future of real estate transactions
(REALTOR members must log in using their NRDS # to make contribution)
Donation envelope
In weeks when I’m in town and go to church at St. Monica’s in St. Louis, Missouri, the ushers will pass around the buckets to collect the weekly tithe. St. Monica’s like other church’s are wise to send out envelopes ahead of time so you can write the check prior to attending.
What I observed that St. Monica’s does that is different from any other church is that on the envelope they provide suggestions for donation amount depending on your salary amount. In other words, if you make $50,000 per year your suggestion donation is $100/week.
Pre-print RPAC donation envelopes with the member’s name and the table of suggested donation amount depending on the gross commission income per year. These personalized envelopes can be mailed out ahead of time and or have blank envelopes to distribute at conferences, events, and other association activities to remind members of how much they should be donated based on the expected amount.
Publishing sales volume vs contributions
How much RPAC donation should a REALTOR member contribute if their annual income after taxes was $50,000? $100,000 $500,000 or more? If RPAC’s mission was to protect the private property rights of homeowners and promote REALTOR advocacy wouldn’t you think the top performers would be the major contributors?
Every MLS publishes sales volume numbers to show who on paper which real estate professional is outperforming the market and the association/members have access to this information. Why not publish a separate report to show the sales ranking along with the RPAC donation? This way you can see who is pulling their weight and the emotional appeal to “not being the free-loader” might push those who didn’t the light before another cause to pull out the checkbook.
Cross selling online donations
There are more PDFs, online videos, and literature that promote supporting RPAC donations. The biggest problem is that they are not interwoven into the offering of multiple services. In other words, to make a RPAC donation someone has to be directly be geared towards RPAC instead of integrating the promotion into online registrations of other services. The post Amazoning Your Association model discusses how to avoid compartmentalizing your value propositions and decrease the labor intensity on staff to get results.
Final question
Which one of these are you able to implement? I’d love your feedback to see how much extra donations you were able to raise.
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