Executive Director’s March Progress Report

On February 1, I took over as Executive Director for the Libertarian Party of Iowa.  I could not be more pleased with the progress we have made.  Last month, we set a fundraising goal of $2,017.  We met our fundraising goal!  We are still in need of funds as making these changes does cost money and resources.

It is my goal to make the Libertarian Party of Iowa the most successful Libertarian Party state affiliate in the country. That includes have more national members, more registered voters, more candidates, and more elected officials per capita than any other state in the country.  Currently, we are somewhere in the middle of the states on national memberships and registered voters. We are fifth in the elected officials and candidates ran per capita in 2016.  My goal is to make sure we lead all these categories.

On March 1st, the state of Iowa officially recognized us as a major party.  We must take steps to keep major party status.  All my plans are to make us more efficient, more professional looking, and more effective at changing public policy and getting Libertarians elected to public office.  It is a lot of hard work, but we have nearly 10,000 registered voters in the state.  We have a great number of people that are willing to donate the funds and do the work that needs to be done.  We have the candidates willing to step-up and make it happen.  I am confident that we as a party will meet these challenges and succeed.  Our mission of restoring the state motto is too important to not take action.

The first action that I took as Executive Director was to redesign the state party website and update our online donation process and include a clickable map for county affiliates.

Before

 

After

The goal was to make us look more professional, easily share information, easily and securely accept donations online. and allow efficient internal communication for party leaders.   I feel like this has been a success.

Each member of the Executive Committee and county affiliates will be given a template they can customize for business cards like the one below:

Contributor Cards are something we have finalized for printing.  If you donate $20 during this year, you will get a contributor card.  These are professionally designed marketing materials that people can show their friends and post on social media.

Social media updates have been critical.  While I don’t want to reveal specific details, our social media presence is beating the Iowa Republican and we are engaging more people than we have in a long time.  We are going to use social media to continue to reach our target demographics and inspire activism, recruit candidates, and explain our issues to the people of Iowa.

We now have a party phone number that members of the media can use to easily reach the state party leadership.  I did two radio interviews last week.  We got statewide coverage with achieving our major party status.  We are building the necessary relationships within our communities, the media, and state government.

Projects that still need funding and resources:

  • County party pages on the website are in progress; however, this takes some time
  • The database is up and running, but there is a lot of work to getting it set up to work how we need it to
  • Intranet-There is great progress being made so we can easily share documents and files with county party affiliates and candidates.  All tests on this have so far not indicated any bugs or issues with this system, but it is still being developed and tested as we go
  • Candidate recruitment:  The ads we run to generate leads cost money not to mention there is a big time commitment for those filtering and responding to the leads.  We want to run 50+ candidates next year.  Online forms have to be built to process the information, etc
  • County Affiliate Support:  We are creating how-to documents on setting up county organizations as well as providing support.  We are behind in this area and are working hard to fix it.
  • Candidate Training:  We have partnered with the Libertarian Leadership Academy to help train candidates.  We have some internal training documents specific to Iowa that we are working on.

Your support is greatly appreciated.  Together, we are going to make this a success.

In Liberty,

Jake Porter

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