One of the many interesting parts of my job at The Next Generation (TNG) in 2016 was to draft boilerplate emails for campaign point people to use. One standby email for candidates of all kinds is the “please make sure your donation shows up in this campaign finance report” – it adds urgency, which is highly effective, at an artificial, essentially arbitrary point before Election Day.
The fact is, deadlines work, and apparently so do fill-in-the-blank email messages.
The point of writing template emails is that, ostensibly, while I was spending time doing the things others couldn’t do (lay out ads, build websites, use Microsoft Access on gigantic voter databases, and so on), TNG’s campaign point people could finish composing emails based on their more in-depth knowledge of the candidates and their basic writing skills. In reality, the results varied—but they got done, which was key.
My templates for these campaign finance reporting deadline emails are here on Google Docs.