What to expect in your first 90 days
The first 90 days of a campaign set the ceiling on everything that follows. Donors, party officials, and political reporters will form an opinion of you in those first three months that is very difficult to revise later. So the work is not glamorous — it is foundational.
Expect to spend the majority of your time on the phone. Not at events. Not on television. On the phone, asking people for money. A serious first-time candidate for a competitive race should be doing four to six hours of call time a day, every weekday, from the moment they file. If that sounds like a lot, it is — and it is also the only way to be in a position to win.
You should also expect to be uncomfortable. Most first-time candidates have never asked another person for $2,900. Most have never called an old college friend to ask them to host a fundraiser. Most have never sat across from a major donor and explained — in three sentences — why they should write a check today instead of next week. All of this is learnable. None of it is comfortable at first.
What call time really is
Call time is the part of campaigning that happens in a small room with a phone, a stack of donor sheets, a finance staffer, and you. It is not networking. It is not catching up. It is a structured, prepared, hour-by-hour fundraising program in which the candidate makes targeted asks to specific donors for specific amounts — and the staff tracks every commit, every follow-up, and every dollar received.
A good call time program will have a daily target (in dollars), a daily call list (segmented by ask amount and likelihood), and a feedback loop (yesterday's commits, this week's pace, this month's budget). The candidate's job during call time is to make calls. The staff's job is to make sure every minute of the candidate's time is spent on the most valuable possible call.
First-time candidates routinely treat call time as optional, or as something to do when they have a free afternoon. They are routinely outraised by candidates who treat it as the single most important thing they do all day.
Most first-time candidates have never asked another person for $2,900. All of it is learnable. None of it is comfortable at first.
How to recruit a finance committee
Your finance committee is a group of people — usually ten to twenty-five for a first-time race — who have agreed to help raise money for your campaign. They are not just donors. They are people who will make calls on your behalf, host events, open their networks, and provide political cover with other donors who don't yet know you.
Recruit them from the people who already know you and want you to win. Your law school roommate. Your former boss. Your cousin who runs a small business. The neighbor who has been telling you for years you should run. They do not need to be wealthy. They need to be willing — willing to ask other people for money on your behalf, willing to put their name on your invitation, willing to show up at a Tuesday-night fundraiser.
Make the ask in person if you can, on the phone if you can't, and never by text. Tell them what specifically you are asking them to do (raise $25,000 by the end of Q3, host one event, make ten calls a week) and tell them what you are asking them to commit (their name, their network, and a specific block of time). People say yes to specific requests. They say no to vague ones.
FEC compliance basics for first-time candidates
If you are running for federal office, the Federal Election Commission regulates almost every dollar that flows in and out of your campaign. The rules are dense, but the basics are knowable: you have a contribution limit per donor per cycle (currently $3,500 for the primary and another $3,500 for the general, indexed for inflation); you cannot accept money from corporations, unions, or foreign nationals; and you must report every contribution and expenditure on a published quarterly schedule.
First-time campaigns most often get into trouble in three places. The first is over-the-limit contributions: a donor gives $3,500, then writes another $3,500 check three weeks later, and someone has to send one of them back. The second is in-kind contributions that are not logged: a supporter prints your yard signs at their print shop, and the value of those signs is a contribution that needs to be recorded and reported. The third is missed deadlines: an FEC filing that goes in a day late is a fine, and fines on a first-time campaign are a story.
None of this is impossible. It is a discipline. The campaigns that handle compliance well treat it as a set of weekly procedures, not as a quarterly emergency.
What NGP is and why it matters
NGP (now NGP VAN, part of Bonterra) is the database of record for almost every Democratic federal campaign. It is where you store your donors, log your contributions, manage your call time lists, draft your FEC filings, and track every interaction your campaign has with every supporter you have.
If your campaign is serious, you will use NGP. If your campaign is not using NGP, your campaign is either very small or in trouble. There are alternatives — Salesforce-based tools, custom CRMs, spreadsheets — but for federal and most statewide Democratic races, NGP is the default for a reason: it is integrated with the party's voter file, it is integrated with FEC reporting, and the people you will hire already know how to use it.
Set it up early. Get your finance staff trained on it before they need it. Do not let your campaign get six months in before realizing your donor data lives in three different spreadsheets and an inbox.
Your first major donor meeting
At some point in your first 60 days, you will sit down with someone who is capable of writing your campaign a maxed-out check. It might be a longtime party donor in your district. It might be a friend of a friend who has supported races like yours before. It might be the person your finance director told you was the most important meeting of the week. You should treat it that way.
Walk in prepared. Know what they have given to in the past. Know who introduced you. Know — to the dollar — what you are asking them for, and have a clear, specific reason why. ("I'm asking you for $3,500 because we are trying to close out our Q2 number by Friday and your commit puts us over the line" is a specific reason. "I'd love your support" is not.)
Listen as much as you talk. Major donors give to candidates they trust to be serious people, not just to candidates with good positions. Your job in the first meeting is to be a serious person — to be someone they can imagine winning — and then to ask, clearly and directly, for their support.