Predictability or Opportunity?

When is the best time to send a fundraising appeal? The short answer is after lunch, say 2:00 p.m., on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, preferably Thursday. Here’s why: Many people do not check their e-mail over the weekend. By Monday morning, their inboxes are clogged with e-mail and anything except the necessities is deleted. Similarly, on Friday, people are trying to finish up so they can leave for the weekend.

I'm sure everyone would agree with the basic concept of this excerpt from the The Political Consultant’s Online Fundraising Primer. Timing is everything. In order to time properly, there needs to be some general sense of continuity among the public.

Despite the prevalent notion that we live in a “polarized nation,” most of us operate on the same schedules. We work, eat, sleep, relax, shower, and do the laundry at generally the same time with remarkable consistency.

What a relief! The chaos of modern life has not changed us to the point that we lose our patterns of predictability.

Is it really predictability, or are there just better times to do certain things? I vote for the second – our lives our constructed in a way that creates opportunity for specific actions to occur at specific times. This is a good thing!

This lesson is extremely relevant to political campaigning. The notion that the distribution of fundraising appeals should occur at precise times comes with a keen observance of how our culture behaves. I believe that this observance is the main driver to delivering the right message at the right time.