Most conservatives in Canada agree on this: the way you win a riding is by knocking doors and having real conversations with voters.

That’s true. It’s also incomplete.

You absolutely need to knock doors. You need volunteers, lawn signs, candidate visibility, and the kind of trust that only gets built face to face. None of that goes away.

But here’s what door-knocking can’t do: identify ten thousand new supporters in a riding in a single year for a few thousand dollars in ad spend, with their full contact information and vote intention. Convert those supporters into a donor file that funds the next campaign. Build a base big enough that when the writ drops, you start the campaign with momentum instead of from scratch.

That’s what a year-round digital program does. It doesn’t replace door-knocking — it runs alongside it, at a scale and speed that volunteer canvassing simply can’t match. And it does most of its work in the years between elections, when the riding has the bandwidth and the cost is low.

This is a guide to what those programs actually look like, what they produce, and how a Conservative EDA can build one without learning the hard way.

What “year-round” actually means

When agencies pitch “year-round digital,” they usually mean some version of “we’ll post on Facebook for you and run a couple of ad campaigns when you ask.”

That’s not what we mean here.

A year-round program is a continuously operating supporter identification engine, paired with an email fundraising program that turns those identified supporters into a donor file. Both run constantly, not in bursts. Both compound monthly. Both are designed so that when the writ eventually drops, you don’t have to ramp up — you just shift the program from “build mode” to “campaign mode.”

It’s three connected systems:

Identify. Native lead-form ads on Meta capture full supporter information — name, email, phone, postal code, and vote intention — typically well under fifty cents per contact in mature programs, dropping to around ten cents in our best ones. Not clicks to a landing page. Not awareness impressions. Identified supporters with usable data.

Engage. Email campaigns sent regularly — one to two per month in the first 90 days, weekly during peak fundraising windows — build the relationship and turn supporters into donors.

Steward. List management keeps the data clean, segmented, and integrated with whatever CRM the campaign uses (typically Campaign Nucleus at the EDA tier).

That’s the program. Three systems running in lockstep, every month, year-round.

The two mechanics that do most of the work

The whole program rests on two specific mechanics. Get them right and the program funds itself. Get them wrong and you’re just spending money.

Mechanic one: native lead-form ads, not click-to-website ads

Most political ad spending in Canada gets routed to clickthrough campaigns — somebody sees an ad on Facebook, clicks, lands on a website, fills out a form, hits submit. By the time they’ve done all that, you’ve lost most of them.

Native lead forms keep the user inside Facebook or Instagram. Their information auto-populates from their profile. The form fits inside the ad. They’re already 90% of the way through completing it before they’ve made the conscious choice to engage. Conversion rates run an order of magnitude higher than click-to-website.

The result: cost per identified supporter — full data, not just an email — typically lands well under fifty cents once a program is dialled in, and as low as ten cents in our best mature programs. Fresh audiences cost more at first; the number comes down as the creative learns and the targeting tightens.

That alone reorders what’s possible. Identifying ten thousand supporters used to be a six-figure investment. Now it runs a few thousand dollars in ad spend, plus the program cost to run it well.

Mechanic two: email fundraising that doesn’t wait for the writ

The mistake most EDAs make with email is treating it like a megaphone — send out a fundraising appeal once a quarter, go quiet when the year-end deadline passes. That model doesn’t work because supporters don’t make donation decisions on the agency’s calendar. They make them when something prompts them: a news cycle, a policy moment, a perceived threat, a perceived opportunity.

A year-round program writes to the calendar of what’s actually happening in Conservative politics that month. Some emails ask for money. Some don’t. The ones that do are timed to moments that matter — late November and early December for year-end giving, the days after a budget that hits hard, a campaign moment that demands a response. Over twelve months, the program raises real money — and along the way builds the donor file that the next campaign depends on.

What real numbers look like

Specifics matter more than abstractions. Here’s what we’ve actually seen in active programs:

A federal Conservative MP in a rural Ontario riding has been running a year-round program for nearly two years. Email list grew 280%. Annual fundraising doubled year-over-year — as did donor count. In 2024 alone, the program reached 1.2 million Canadians with 6.3 million ad impressions. Most of the fundraising came directly through emails written by our team. The program runs continuously, and the MP is now one of the most digitally active in the country.

An anonymized Conservative EDA in a competitive urban Ontario riding launched a year-round program from a near-zero list. In one year, the EDA grew to nearly 90,000 email contacts — one of the largest political email lists in Canada. Over 55,000 new supporters were identified at an average cost of $0.10 each. The email program raised $65,242 in that first year. A single seven-email year-end sequence raised $36,719 of that total — from one EDA, in one week.

A major provincial Conservative party scaled a year-round program into an election-year program — and built an email file that reached roughly 10% of all eligible voters in the province. Online fundraising in the election year cleared seven figures. The party won.

These aren’t outliers. They’re what year-round programs at three different scales — federal MP, urban EDA, provincial party — actually produce.

Why it compounds (the flywheel that beats spending)

Here’s the part that matters most.

If you spend $10,000 on a writ-period digital campaign with no list to start from, you spend most of it just getting people’s attention. The dollars buy reach. They don’t buy infrastructure.

If you’ve been running a year-round program, you start the writ with a list of identified supporters who already know your candidate, are already on your email file, and have already given money — possibly more than once. The writ-period spending now buys persuasion and turnout instead of awareness and identification.

Different math, vastly different output.

This is the flywheel: every month the year-round program runs, the next month gets cheaper. You’re emailing a bigger list to fund the next ad campaign. The next ad campaign produces more supporters, who become next year’s donors, who fund the year after that. By the time the writ drops, you’ve spent the same dollars an opponent did — but yours produced cumulative infrastructure, while theirs produced one-off impressions.

This is also why most of our clients report that the program pays for itself within 6 to 12 months of launch. Email fundraising recovers the retainer cost. The ad spend that built the list keeps producing supporters who keep giving. The math compounds.

What a year actually looks like

Operationally, here’s roughly what a year-round program looks like for an EDA, month over month:

Months 1–3 — Build mode. Lead-form ad campaigns launch on Meta. New supporters start coming in immediately — you’ll see list growth from week one. Email cadence is one to two sends per month: introductory content, the case for being on the list, light fundraising asks. The donor file starts forming. The list is small enough that engagement rates are high — you use this period to learn what messaging actually resonates with your supporters.

Months 4–6 — Acceleration. The list has grown into the thousands. Email cadence picks up to two or three per month. Spring budget moments and provincial or federal political news become organic fundraising opportunities. The program starts producing meaningful donor revenue. Cost per supporter typically settles into a stable range as the creative matures — there’s no diminishing return at this scale, because Conservative supporter populations in most ridings vastly exceed what a single program identifies.

Months 7–9 — Steady state. Ad spend continues. The list crosses ten thousand or more in many ridings. Email cadence settles into weekly during active fundraising windows. The program is largely self-funding by this point. Whatever fundraising surplus exists starts going where it does the most good — supporting other Conservative campaigns across the country, building the donor file for the next election, or simply lowering the EDA’s net spend.

Months 10–12 — The year-end push. This is the heaviest fundraising window of the entire calendar. A multi-email sequence in late November and early December typically raises a meaningful share of the year’s total. The single seven-email year-end sequence one of our clients ran last year raised $36,719. From one EDA, in one week.

Year two and beyond. The list is now substantial enough that even modest engagement produces real revenue. The infrastructure is in place. The program runs in steady state with planned acceleration windows around budgets, election-adjacent moments, and the writ when it eventually drops.

Three traps that swallow EDAs

Most EDAs that try to run digital in-house — or hire a generalist agency — fall into the same three traps.

Trap one: saving the budget for the election. This is the conventional wisdom and it’s costing EDAs more than they realize. The opportunity cost of sitting on $100,000 for three or four years instead of running a program is enormous: thousands of supporters never identified, a donor file that never gets built, an ad-creative learning curve that doesn’t happen until the worst possible moment. By the time the writ drops, the EDA that “saved” enters the campaign with the same cold list it had four years ago. The EDA that built has a list ten or twenty times larger and a year of fundraising data to optimize against.

Trap two: clickthrough ads instead of lead forms. Anyone who tells you to run “Facebook ads” without specifically running native lead forms is leaving most of the value on the table. The cost-per-identified-supporter difference between the two formats isn’t 20% — in our data it’s typically five to ten times. If your agency or in-house team isn’t running native lead forms, fix that before anything else.

Trap three: ad-only programs with no email. Identifying supporters is half the program. Without an email engine that turns those supporters into donors, you’ve spent money to build a list you can’t monetize. We’ve seen EDAs spend $20,000 a year on ads with nothing on the email side — and produce a fraction of the revenue an integrated program produces with the same total spend.

If you’re going to build this, here’s what to look for

Whether you build the program in-house, with your existing agency, or with us, a few questions screen for whether the people doing the work actually understand the model.

Ask any agency: what’s your average cost per identified supporter, and over what volume? If they can’t answer in dollars and cents — or the number they give is north of a dollar — they probably aren’t running native lead-form programs effectively.

Ask: how many emails do you send per month per client at our tier, and who writes them? If the answer is “we send when there’s news,” or “the client writes them,” the program isn’t really being run — it’s being supervised.

Ask: what’s your email-to-revenue ratio for clients at our scale? The answer should be specific and grounded. “It depends” is a non-answer.

Ask: do we keep the list and the donor file if we end the engagement? The answer should be unambiguously yes. Your list is your list.

Closing

The Conservative movement in Canada has spent the last decade catching up on digital infrastructure. Most national-level work is now serious. The gap that remains is at the riding and EDA level — most associations still operate the way they did fifteen years ago, saving money for the election and treating digital as something that happens during the writ.

The associations that have moved past that model are quietly building lists ten times the size of their neighbours, fundraising at multiples their opponents can’t match, and entering writs with infrastructure that doesn’t have to be built from scratch.

Year-round programs work. The math works. The mechanics are well-understood. The only question is whether your association is running one yet.

If you’re thinking about building a year-round program for your riding, see how our Riding Programs work — or book a call with Dean to talk through what it could look like for your association specifically.