Crowdsourcing Obama's Donations
By Patrick Ruffini, 02/20/2008 - 10:55am

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Barack Obama won the Wisconsin primary tonight, cementing his status as the likely Democratic nominee. He now has a chance to wrap it up on March 4th.

For a while I've been mentally keeping tabs on Obama's online fundraising numbers via the live count of the number of donors on his web site. However, it's no RonPaulGraphs.com, with its deep analytics probing daily donation activity.

So, I've decided to crowdsource my monitoring of Obama's website. Through a nifty new feature in Google Docs and Spreadsheets, I can now collect input for spreadsheets via a form. I'm asking folks to take the two bits of information (number of donors and time) and plug it into this form. This will take less than 30 seconds. You're free to help out with this monitoring project more than once a day.

The spreadsheet with the latest numbers is here. I've added calculations for what they are on pace to do in a day using their number of donors and assuming a $120 online contribution average.


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Projection Algorithm

Out of curiosity, what formula/algorithm are you using to calculate your "daily projected donors" and "daily projected haul" values?

By TheodoreTest at Wed, 02/20/2008 - 11:50am | login or register to post comments

Donors divided by time period

It's donors divided by time period since the last update.

Obviously this isn't perfect as traffic fluctuates throughout the day and with outgoing emails. But it provides a standard to assess the pace of donations coming in.

By Patrick Ruffini at Wed, 02/20/2008 - 11:57am | login or register to post comments

Ah, I see.

Cool, you're using it as an "instantaneous rate of donations" indicator.

If you want to provide an aggregate measure of daily donors/haul, there's a rather simple way to implement it.

(CurrentNumberOfDonors - FirstNumberOfDonors) / (CurrentTime - First Time)

Normalized by time units, of course. This might be a straightforward predictor for how things'll look at the end of the day.

By TheodoreTest at Wed, 02/20/2008 - 12:37pm | login or register to post comments



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