Summary

The practice of funding a campaign from many small individual donations rather than a few large ones — the financial backbone of small-dollar, distributed campaigns.

Body

Grassroots fundraising covers acquisition (the first-donation ask), retention (recurring-donor programmes), upgrade (moving donors from small to mid-tier), and stewardship (impact reporting). The Commons Library publishes a fundraising module covering the mechanics — donor pyramids, ask ladders, and the recurring-vs-one-off tradeoff [source: commons-library]. MobLab covers fundraising in the distributed-organising context — peer-to-peer fundraising pages where supporters fundraise on the campaign’s behalf [source: moblab]. Action Network’s tools and blog are US practitioner references for small-donor digital fundraising [source: action-network]. Campact’s model in Germany is the European reference for mass-membership online fundraising — the Fördermitglied (sustaining member) program has built a multi-million-euro base from small monthly donations [source: campact]. The politics of grassroots fundraising: it is not just a revenue strategy — it is a power-building strategy. A campaign funded by 100,000 small donors has a constituency that can be re-mobilised; a campaign funded by 5 foundations has a constituency of 5.

Use it for

Designing a small-donor programme; setting a fundraising target; structuring a recurring-donor ask.

Worked examples

• case-studies/campact-model

Related

None yet.

Open Questions

None yet.

Open Questions

None yet.

Sources & verification

• sources/commons-library — grounding: secondary — RAW (5257 chars)
• sources/moblab — grounding: secondary — RAW (645 chars)
• sources/action-network — grounding: secondary — RAW (1419 chars)
• sources/campact — grounding: secondary — RAW (1939 chars)

Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.