How to Run a Letter Writing Campaign with Excel and Gmail

You don’t need fancy software to run a letter writing campaign. A spreadsheet and your email app will get you surprisingly far. Here’s how to do it right, and how to know when you’ve outgrown it.

The Basic Setup

Start with a spreadsheet. Google Sheets or Excel both work. You need columns for volunteer name, email, how many letters they’ve committed to write, how many addresses you’ve sent them, and whether they’ve reported back as done.

That’s it. Five columns. You can add more later, but this is what matters.

For your voter addresses, create a separate sheet or file. Pull your list from your state voter file, VAN, or whatever data source you’re using. Each volunteer gets a chunk of addresses based on their commitment. If someone says they’ll write 25 letters, send them 25 addresses.

The Workflow

Week one: Email your volunteer list asking who wants to participate and how many letters they can commit to. Track responses in your spreadsheet. Be specific about deadlines.

Week two: Divide your voter addresses among volunteers based on their commitments. Email each volunteer their chunk of addresses as a CSV or copy-pasted list. Include your message template and any instructions about format, what to write, and when to mail.

Weeks three and four: Send reminder emails. Ask volunteers to report back when they’ve mailed their letters. Update your spreadsheet.

After mailing: Tally up your totals. How many letters went out? What percentage of volunteers actually completed their commitment?

What Works About This Approach

It’s simple. Everyone knows how to use email and spreadsheets. You don’t need to train anyone on new software. You don’t need to pay for a subscription. You can get started today.

For a campaign with 20 to 50 volunteers, this works fine. You can manage the coordination yourself or split it with one other person. The spreadsheet stays manageable. The email volume is reasonable. You can personally follow up with people who go quiet.

What Breaks Down

Past 50 volunteers, you start drowning.

You’re sending dozens of individualized emails with address chunks. You’re manually updating the spreadsheet every time someone reports back. You’re losing track of who has which addresses. You accidentally send the same voter addresses to two different people. A volunteer emails you asking for more addresses and you can’t remember what you already sent them.

The administrative overhead scales linearly with volunteer count. Double your volunteers, double your coordination work. Triple your volunteers, triple the chaos.

There are other problems too. You have no visibility into whether volunteers actually mailed their letters, just whether they said they did. You can’t easily redistribute addresses from volunteers who dropped off. If you’re running multiple campaigns or targeting different races, you’re juggling multiple spreadsheets with no way to see the big picture.

And then there’s quality control. With Excel and email, you’re trusting that every volunteer correctly copied addresses, wrote appropriate messages, and actually mailed the letters. You won’t know about problems until it’s too late to fix them.

When to Move On

If any of these sound familiar, you’ve probably outgrown the spreadsheet approach:

You’re spending more time on coordination than on strategy
You’ve lost track of which addresses went to which volunteers
Volunteers are asking questions you can’t answer quickly
You’re running multiple simultaneous campaigns
You’re scaling past 50 active volunteers
You need to report detailed metrics to funders or partners

At that point, a purpose-built tool like Sincere handles the logistics so you can focus on the campaign itself. Automatic address assignment, volunteer tracking, reminders, and reporting all happen without you manually updating cells.

Start Where You Are

Don’t let the lack of perfect tools stop you from running your first campaign. Excel and email work. They’ll get real letters into real voters’ mailboxes. That matters more than having slick software.

But be honest with yourself about when the approach stops working. The goal is to move voters, not to prove you can manage chaos. If the spreadsheet is eating your time, it’s time to upgrade.