What do you get when campaign veterans get fed up with Excel? You get Warchest! Warchest is the only tool that addresses the unique issues of campaign cash flow, allowing you to budget wisely and integrate with your finance team to make sure you spend every last penny you have to win on Election Day.
From Suze Orman to Robert Kiyosaki, there’s no shortage of people trying to tell you how you should budget your life. But unlike with personal finance, there aren’t any celebrity finance gurus just waiting to tell you how to budget for your campaign, which is why we interviewed Conner Johnston, co-founder of Warchest. In this Tools Episode, Joe chats with Conner about Warchest, the only tool that helps you make sure you spend down to zero before Election Day. Warchest also allows for coordination with your finance team, to always make sure you’re 100% on top of your campaign finances. So rather than use a complex, outdated Excel spreadsheet, listen to this episode to learn more about Warchest can make your budgeting life easier.
Resources
100+ Best Political Campaign Tools
Connect with us!
If you have campaign questions or want to learn more, reach out to us using the contact information below.
Twitter: @cmpwrkshp
Instagram: @TheCampaignWorkshop
Email: marketing@thecampaignworkshop.com
Joe Fuld
Twitter: @joefuld
Instagram: @joefuld
Martín Diego Garcia
Twitter: @gmartindiego
Instagram: @gmartindiego
Presented by The Campaign Workshop
Joe Fuld (00:00):
Hey there. It's Joe Fuld. Welcome to another session of How to Win a Campaign: Tools Edition. This week I'm going to be interviewing Conner Johnston from Warchest to talk about his tool Warchest. Conner, how are you?
Conner Johnston (00:16):
Doing great. Doing great. How about you all?
Joe Fuld (00:18):
We're doing okay. So talk to me a little bit about Warchest. How long has the tool been around?
Conner Johnston (00:26):
The tool has been around, we formed the company about five years ago, but we've been on the market for about three and a half. So two, almost two full cycles right now.
Joe Fuld (00:38):
And tell me why you decided to build the tool. Why is it important?
Conner Johnston (00:43):
Yeah, so campaign budgeting, when, when you talk about campaign budgeting, people, sometimes their eyes gloss over a little bit, especially if they haven't run a budget, but campaign budgeting is one of the more critical, but under valued aspects of a campaign. Unlike any other organization, campaigns have to spend down to zero on election day. Any money leftover is money that you could have spent towards winning and campaigns are also unique because the vast majority of their resources, their money raised and their expenses, you know, money going out, all come within the last couple of months, even a couple of weeks. So you're really trying to hit this moving target of money coming in, money coming out and trying to get to zero on or near election day. And it's a very difficult task to do no matter how expert of a budgeter you are just because the cash flow is so unpredictable. So you really need to be on top of it. And you know, we've heard horror stories from dozens of campaign managers that have, you know, misallocated or didn't realize there was money that they could have spent to win. And so campaign budgeting is really one of those difficult things to do, and we created Warchest to make it easier to be completely frank and also to solve our own problems because we have run campaigns and know how hard it is and how important it is to make sure that your resources are correctly allocated and spent throughout the cycle.
Joe Fuld (02:15):
Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about that from a background standpoint, why did you feel like you needed to build this tool and why was it so important to build it?
Conner Johnston (02:25):
Well, we built it my, I met my cofounder, Josh Wolf on Congressman Ami Bera's race out in Sacramento in 2012. I had effectively minored in Excel in college and I loved playing around with it. And Josh was a budget guru and we put our heads together to figure out if we can make a better spreadsheet, because that was the tool. Every campaign was using up into that point. And each spreadsheet was completely different, but all of them had an inherent flaw of being really unable to predict by day where a campaign's cashflow was. So we put our resources and experienced together and really created a sophisticated spreadsheet that allowed us to predict where our cashflow was going to be and if and when we were going to hit zero, hoping that would be close to election day. And that tool was actually ended up being used by dozens of races afterwards, including Josh ran a gubernatorial race in Massachusetts and then Patrick Murphy's Senate race in Florida and used that tool as well. But the problem was, it was still a spreadsheet and it had inherent problems to it. And so we decided we've got to bring campaign budgeting to the 21st century, and that's why we ended up developing Warchest. Cause there was just such a need for this beyond just our network. Every campaign has this issue and we wanted to make campaign budgeting easier and give those campaign managers, you know, some peace of mind as well.
Joe Fuld (03:52):
Yeah. So, I mean, what other budgeting tools are you competing with? Is it just Excel?
Conner Johnston (03:58):
Generally yeah, there is no other tool that is specifically geared towards addressing the unique cashflow issues of campaigns. It really is. Individuals, have you talked to 12 campaign consultants, experienced campaign consultants and to ask them, let me see your budget spreadsheet. And you're going to see 12 different campaign budget spreadsheets. Up, up until we started Warchest. Now we're, we're becoming the industry standard for campaign budgeting because we're the only tool that addresses the issue. And so before that the, you know, the spreadsheets were varied in the levels of granularity that you could actually forecast your cashflow with and also in the level of accuracy as well. And so yeah, Warchest now addresses that and is the only campaign budget tool out there that again, addresses the unique issues of campaign budgeting.
Joe Fuld (04:50):
Yeah. Well this is a tool that was one of our picks for 2020 on The Campaign Workshop's tools list. You can check that out at thecampaignworkshop.com, but yeah, it's super interesting that there isn't a lot of competition in the campaign budgeting space.
Conner Johnston (05:10):
We're really first and foremost really honored to be part of that. We appreciate you guys taking the time to talk more about Warchest, because I think really the issue is if you, if you're not a campaign manager or someone that runs a budget and you knocked on doors, I've done operations, I've done field work, I've done a lot of things. And none of those were directly related to budgeting until I actually became like senior staff on a campaign. So a lot of people don't really understand how important it is unless you have run a budget. And so we really are trying to make not only budgeting better, but make people more aware of the importance of having an up to date accurate and effective budget because it really is the campaign's playbook. When am I going to go on, when am I going to send mailers? When am I going to open up that other field office? When am I going to do all these hires? And most importantly, when am I going to have the money to do that? And we answer all those, we help the campaign managers answer all those questions easily and efficiently.
Joe Fuld (06:14):
So how much does it cost for a campaign to use Warchest?
Conner Johnston (06:18):
It varies. It varies by the size of the campaign. You know, we are a budget company and we like to say, we will never break a campaign's budget because that would be counterproductive. And also because we are ourselves former staffers of progressive campaigns and we really want to support other campaigns and winning. So we really charge a reasonable fee to use Warchest. And so it varies depending on the size of the race.
Joe Fuld (06:44):
Yeah. Can you give us a sense of range, right? Like if you're a state rep race or if you're a, you know, if, if you're a congressional race, just a sense of that.
Conner Johnston (06:54):
Yeah. And it also depends on, you know, that there are customizability in terms of what your packages, you know, how many users you want, how many budgets you want to run, stuff like that. But if you're a state leg race, it's going to be somewhere between the 100 and 200 a month. And then if you're a Senate race, you know, we add extra features in there as well. Statewide races are going to be closer to five or 600 a month kind of range.
Joe Fuld (07:16):
Great. And so tell us, are there any new features that you're excited about for 2020?
Conner Johnston (07:22):
Yes. We always pride ourselves on innovation. We always take user feedback and incorporate it in that, into the application because we like to consider ourselves kind of the warehouse of best practices for Democratic campaign budgeting. So we get feedback all the time it's Oh, wouldn't it be great if you added this, wouldn't it be cool if we can kind of make these areas communicate better to each other and you, because even though we consider ourselves expert budgeters we recognize that there's a lot of other people out there that have a lot of experience. So one of those tools that we incorporated this cycle is a finance plan. So we're bringing in now the finance directors' aspects of how they forecast how much money they're going to be able to raise for the cycle and put that directly into their budget. So campaign manager can directly promote or incorporate the finance plan from the same application into their cashflow projections so that the team is really working cohesively within one application, further, reducing the potential errors of communication, passing the finance plan back and forth and incorporating your budget and stuff like that. We've also incorporated a committee dashboard that allows committees and consultants that are overseeing, you know, maybe three races, may four races, maybe two dozen races, maybe a hundred races. And in this dashboard you can see the level of financial information of every single race you're overseeing. In one page, you can quickly see what races are doing alright, and finances, and which ones might need some more help or that need to update their budget and really dig into the weeds. So we've really run the gamut on the kinds of new features that we've incorporated for this cycle.
Joe Fuld (09:16):
So Conner tell me how many folks roughly used this in the 2018 cycle and how much money was budgeted through Warchest?
Conner Johnston (09:28):
Yeah, 2018 was a really good cycle for uh Warchest users. We had over 140 users or 140 individual campaigns and committees using the app. And that included over 500 individual users that were budgeting for those campaigns on the app. And collectively we actually had over a half a billion dollars that were being managed through the Warchest application of 2018 cycle. So we feel very proud to have played such a role in the wave election of 2018.
Joe Fuld (10:05):
Great. And do you have a sort of prediction or a goal for how many campaigns or how much money you want to budget on the site for uh 2020?
Conner Johnston (10:16):
Yeah, effectively double. And we're on track to hit that right now, we already have over 200 users or 200 campaigns and over 500 users already on that application. So we're already at where we were in 2018 and we feel confident we'll be able to hit the billion dollar mark this year, which would be great, especially because it's a presidential and very important election as well. So we're really saying Warchest, becoming the go to application for budgeting. You know, we are the only ones, but we are also the go to for helping people understand the importance of budgeting. And we're becoming for a whole wave of generation, a new generation of campaign managers, the only way that they figured out or the only thing that they have budgeted on so far. So we're very proud to have played that role.
Joe Fuld (11:10):
One more question. So in the world of like COVID-19 and Corona virus that we're dealing with right now what are ways that you think budgeting becomes even that more important, right. As we're dealing with campaigns that are really having difficulty raising money and spending money, and it's, it's a hard time for campaigns, how can your tool helpful?
Conner Johnston (11:35):
It's like, I don't want to say it's like any other curve ball that you get on the campaign. Cause it's not, this is unprecedented, everybody's experiencing it, but it is another example of how unpredictable campaign budgeting is. And what warchest allows you to do is really budget for any scenario. So a lot of our managers, what we recommend is you can create one budget. This is kind of my idealistic budget. And then you can duplicate that and play around with scenarios saying, all right, if COVID is really going to affect donations dollars coming in, let's pretend that we only are getting 60% of our donations and you can incorporate that in and then have a secondary backup budget to know, alright, I'm starting to see the donations tick down. I need to start adjusting my playbook on how to win. And I have a budget ready to do that. So we really incorporate the flexibility to handle any unforeseen event, even something as bad as you know, what's currently happening.
Joe Fuld (12:36):
Well, listen, thanks so much for your time. Conner. If folks want to reach out and find out more about Warchest, where do they reach you?
Conner Johnston (12:44):
Mywarchest.Com. And that's just M Y W A R C H E S T.com. All of our information is on that page. Talks about the application gives you some feature previews and also allows you to sign up for a demo. And we like to do one-on-one demos so that we can really tailor them to the individual campaigns need and show them how Warchest can make their life easier.
Joe Fuld (13:08):
And we really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about Warchest.
Conner Johnston (13:14):
Thank you so very much.
Joe Fuld (13:16):
Thanks for listening to this episode of How to Win a Campaign: Tools Edition. To learn more about great campaign tools, check out our blog and remember to like, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
(Outro Music)