Tandem Fundraising

In this article:

1. Creating a Tandem form
2. Tandem form user experience
3. Tracking your Tandem Fundraising

Tandem Fundraising is an ActBlue feature that allows campaigns, organizations, and activists to fundraise for multiple groups on a single contribution form. When a donor gives on a Tandem Fundraising form, they can easily split their contribution between all of the groups listed (or choose which ones they’d like to give to).

You can create a form for your own campaign or organization and add others who are working alongside you in your issue area, or you can create a form that lists groups you’d like to help support. If you're a campaign or organization hoping to raise money for yourself and others, please check in first with your ActBlue account manager to go over some guidelines before creating your Tandem form. Donors can also create Tandem forms with their favorite candidates or organizations and send them to their personal networks. Check out our blog post on creating nominee funds for an example.

Whether you’re a senator looking to keep your email list active between elections, an organizer working to elect officials that will fight for your cause, or a charity working with other nonprofits to respond to a crisis like a hurricane, Tandem Fundraising is a powerful tool.

Potential Tandem Fundraising uses:

• If you’re a candidate in a tough or unknown election, you can ask a popular office holder to email their list on your behalf and help you get more supporters (and raise some money for themselves). This is especially useful for down-ballot races, special elections, and Democrats running in Republican districts or against GOP incumbents.
• If you’re not up for election for a few more years but you need to keep your email list active, you can raise money for yourself and an organization or candidate working to address a current event!
• If you’re an organization or PAC, you can raise funds for candidates who will advocate for your cause!
• If you’re hosting a digital event with other candidates or organizations, you can use our featured video tool along with Tandem Fundraising: On forms with a featured video, supporters will be able to watch the livestream and donate at the same time, and after donating they will stay on the form so they can continue to watch!
• The options are endless!

Creating a Tandem Form

Before creating your form, make sure you understand whom you can and cannot legally fundraise for. 

• If your organization is designated as a 501(c)(4) you have the ability to fundraise with other 501(c)(4)s, political groups, or 501(c)(3)s. 
• If your organization is a 501(c)(3) you can fundraise with other 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s, but not with political groups. 
• If you’re a political candidate, you can fundraise with other candidates, 501(c)(4)s, or political groups. And you can always send out a Tandem 501(c)(3) page as long as you don’t include your own campaign.

If you want to create a Tandem form to raise funds for yourself and others, the candidate or organization that will actually be sending the form to donors should be the creator. This will highlight the fact that they’re making a personal ask on behalf of another group(s) and let them add their own branding to the form. 

Set up the contribution form as you normally would. Once you're happy with your form, go to the 'Recipients' tab in the form editor.

Before you can add multiple recipients, you need to turn off remarketing. To do this, click on the 'disable' link.

You can also go to the 'Remarketing' tab in the form editor and uncheck the 'Enable remarketing' box and publish your changes.

Once remarketing is turned off, search for the individual or group you want to add in the 'Add recipient' field of the 'Recipients' tab.

Click on the name in the dropdown to add the new recipient to your form. If you’re raising for a candidate, make sure you pay close attention to the election year and office listed, as there are sometimes multiple accounts per candidate. You can make sure you're selecting the correct recipient by comparing your dropdown selection to the results in our directory, which can be found here.

Continue adding candidates or organizations until you’re finished. If you try to add a group and see a pop-up error message after you click 'Publish,' it means their tax designation does not allow you to raise funds for them.

If you only want to raise for others and not yourself, you’ll create the form yourself. You’ll just need to go to the 'Recipients' tab of the form editor and click on the subtract sign next to your name (and then publish your changes). This is useful when responding to situations like natural disasters where you want to give your donors a chance to help others.

If you made a mistake or want to delete a candidate or group from the contribution form, you can also remove them this way.

Once you add a new recipient to your Tandem form, a new section will appear in the form editor: “Email permissions pop-up.”

By default, when a donor gives on a Tandem form, their contact information is shared with every recipient on the form. If you are the managing entity on a Tandem form and you want to change this default setting so that donors are asked after they give whether they want to share their contact information with the other recipients on the Tandem form, change this setting to “ Yes.” This will show donors a pop-up box after they've donated that asks them to opt-in to share their information. 

To preview your pop-up, click the “Preview email permissions pop-up” button in the form editor.

Please note that the entity that manages the Tandem form will always receive the contact information for all donors that give on the form (both those who opt-in and those who opt-out of sharing their information with the other groups), even if the managing entity has not listed itself as a recipient on the form. However, at this time managing entities cannot see which donors opted in or out of sharing their contact information with the other recipients.

Remember to publish your changes when you've finished editing your recipients and form permissions!

Tandem Form User Experience

When your donors land on a Tandem Fundraising form, they’ll see the usual amount buttons with a note above them saying that their donation will be split among every group on the page. Here’s an example: SwingLeft created a Tandem form titled 'Protect Reproductive Rights' to fundraise for Planned Parenthood Southeast Advocates, Yellowhammer Fund, and National Network of Abortion Funds. 

If a donor selects the $30 button on this form, each group will receive $10. Alternatively, your donors can choose to split their contribution differently by clicking the “Customize amounts” link. 

The donor can then choose exactly how much they’d like to give to each individual candidate or organization, as shown below. Donors will receive an itemized receipt for their records with each individual contribution.

The order your groups appear in on your Tandem form will stay the same unless you choose to randomize them. If you are listing more than a few organizations, we highly recommend using our randomization feature to avoid the first group(s) getting all the money when people don’t contribute enough to benefit everyone on the form. To do this, go back to the 'Recipients' tab in your form editor and select 'Random' in the dropdown for Recipients order.

Publish your changes to save them.

If you choose not to use the randomization feature, you can manually drag and drop the groups to reorder them. 

Tracking Your Tandem Fundraising

To see how much you raised for yourself and the others on your Tandem form, go to the Statistics page for your form. To do this, click the “Stats” button in the form navigation bar (form navbar) when you are viewing your form, or click on the “Contributions” or “Amount” links for the form in your Dashboard toolbar’s Contribution Forms tab.

The first table will show your overall results — contributions to all of the candidates and organizations listed on the form, combined. Scroll past that table and click on the dropdown menu for “Contribution summary by recipient” beneath it.

Here you can see how much was raised, and by how many contributions, for each candidate or organization on your Tandem form. 

Every active entity will also have a Tandem Fundraising tab in the Dashboard toolbar. 

If you’ve created a Tandem form, you’ll be able to track and compare results for the groups you’ve raised for by clicking on this tab. 

Tandem Fundraising is a key organizing tool. With Tandem forms, donors can give quickly to multiple candidates and organizations they care about, or they can build their own contribution forms listing groups they want to support and rally their networks around. It’s a great way for candidates and organizations with the same goals to work together and maximize their fundraising!