techPresident - Crowdsourcing Obama's Donations - Comments

Ah, I see.

TheodoreTest — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:37:26 -0500

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.

Donors divided by time period

Patrick Ruffini — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:57:10 -0500

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.

Projection Algorithm

TheodoreTest — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:50:05 -0500

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

Crowdsourcing Obama's Donations

Patrick Ruffini — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:55:20 -0500

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.