National Fundraising Campaigns
ILLUSTRATION COPYWRITING
ART DIRECTION DIGITAL COMMS
FUNDRAISING/DEVELOPMENT
As the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s art director, I established a style and process for producing hundreds of winning graphics to support the DCCC’s text-message fundraising program from 2018 to 2021. This page is a sampling of the text-message graphics I designed and illustrated personally, while other graphics in the broader program were designed by a junior designer under my art direction.
BACKGROUND
My creative team was closely involved in the fast-paced email and text-message program that reached over 5 million grassroots donors nationwide and raised continually record-breaking amounts for the committee and Democratic congressional candidates across the country.
With an average of 5 to 10 emails and text messages written and sent each day, the creative team’s job is to quickly distill the fundraising team’s message into attention-grabbing graphics that differentiate the message from other communications, succinctly communicates the urgency and purpose of the accompanying message, and fosters a sense of trust that each small-dollar donation is in good hands.
APPROACH
Graphics were routinely A/B tested with different colors, copy, animated features, etc., as well as tested against simple text messages without graphics. I used these findings to inform design strategies that eventually led to the established styles shown on this page: Under my art direction, graphics accompanying text-message sends acted as editorial illustrations with short, to-the-point calls to action (CTAs) and adhered to a style that was expressive, polished, and firmly rooted in the DCCC identity.
Graphics requests from the fundraising team rolled in daily, usually with messages relating to the day’s top headlines in political news, and always with demanding turnaround times to keep the program on schedule. To keep the design process efficient for the team, I created a series of Photoshop templates with locked guides, standardized headline and CTA language and positioning, and preview layers to ensure pertinent information stays in frame across a range of mobile devices.
RESULTS
The digital fundraising team during this time was extremely successful, seeing historic, record-breaking totals nearly every month. The standardized “new message screen” graphics I created (in blue or red, depending on urgency), introducing messages from high-profile surrogates are still in use by the committee.
