Best days to come

Following up on my earlier post about the value of riding-based online fundraising, Robert Silver makes some good points about the Cons' current advantage in issue-based appeals for support. While Silver's focus is from a Lib perspective, the same message would seem to apply equally for the NDP.

In particular, most of the New Democrats' e-mail appeals seem to be based largely on party promotion rather than drawing strong contrasts - in effect, relying on an informative tone of "here's what we're doing", rather than a more aggressive "here's what we're fighting". Which would seem to me to be exactly the type of message one would want to aim at the general public to help build up positive images of the party.

But anybody on the party's e-mail list would figure to have a positive enough impression to want to help to some extent. Instead, the hurdle in fund-raising is to spur those somewhat supportive individuals to action - which would seem to often demand an appeal to what the NDP is up against on specific issues which speak strongly to a constituency within the party, rather than feel-good messages with less of a targeted appeal.

Of course, there's always some challenge in then meeting the expectations of those who donate based on specific issues. (And one of the more interesting dangers facing the Cons is the possibility of a backlash to the extent they still raise money on issues where they've declined to do anything while in office.)

But when it comes to building the grassroots, one of the most obvious areas for future development is to start building deeper ties based on the specific issues in the sights of the NDP's current and potential supporters. And both the party and those supporters stand to benefit if the New Democrats can succeed in replicating the Cons' fund-raising machine.