techPresident - Show Us Some Real Money, Hillary! - Comments

Sounds like you are advocating for a neutral observer

KansasNate — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:30:47 -0400

Thankfully, the Democrats already have that option. ActBlue's numbers will always be up-to-date and correct and any fundraising claim made by a campaign using ActBlue is 100% trustworthy.

Sure, I'm biased, but boasting about fundraising number always irks me when it comes from a non-transparent campaign. I'm sure that 99% of campaigns are absolutely truthful, but if you want to brag (nothing wrong with it!) use a neutral party to verify your numbers.

Since the thread was originally about Clinton and her numbers, I might as well say that I know her campaign to be professionally managed and I don't think they would ever exaggerate.

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Disclosure: I work for ActBlue as their Technology Director.

It might be worthwhile to check out HRC's 2/5 claims

AlchemyToday — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:02:43 -0400

On the night of Super Tuesday and in the day or two after, the Clinton camp made very similar claims of fundraising success. Leading up to 2/5, they were in much the same trouble fiscally as they are now. Did their claims on 2/5 match the results when they filed their 1st quarter numbers? If not, that's good reason to be skeptical here.

I'd bet it wouldn't be too hard to have called a bunch of Hillary supporters (volunteers who hadn't donated, donors who hadn't maxed out) a week before the PA primary and ask for pledges should she prove her mettle in PA. Mass calls/e-mails to those people after the nets call it for her, funneling all donations through the Internet, and, there you go, unprecedented online fundraising. She could also trigger all of her auto-credit-card donations to go through when needed to maximize her perceived success. Also counts as Internet bucks.

You're right that it's all about perceived success; Hillary's camp did a good job feigning desperation ahead of the PA results (everyone on TV had bought into the line that she was broke; prominent donors were feeding them info that it'd dry up without a win there) to lead into her 'turning the tide' story.

The 60,000 donors was true as of noon

Xavier Lopez-Ayala — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:43:36 -0400

I just wanted to offer some corrections to your piece. If you respond to my email, I can get you copies of the original email.

Hillary was on track to raise $10 million within 24 hours. The press release that went out said that by 12pm on the 23rd (yesterday), the campaign had received 60,000 donations w/ 50,000 new donors.

The email you received from Terry was a mass email that started to go out yesterday afternoon, so it is very likely that you got the email after that mark was reached, and with information that was only specific to the number of donors by noon on Wednesday. I'm not sure if the mass email from Terry made specific that this was as of noon yesterday, but here's the update that came from the campaign:

Clinton Campaign on Track to Raise $10 Million Online in the 24 Hrs Since Winning PA Primary

Historic fundraising pace represents campaign’s best day ever

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is on track to raise $10 million online in the 24 hours since she was declared the winner of the Pennsylvania primary last night.

“Senator Clinton’s game-changing victory last night has turned the tide and resulted in an historic outpouring of grassroots support,” said Campaign Chairman Terry McAuliffe. “Just like Hillary, our supporters have met every challenge and come through each time. Thanks to them, we will have the resources needed to compete and win as we move ahead to the next contests.”

In addition, the campaign has received support from over 60,000 donors through noon today, of whom approximately 50,000 are new donors.

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The Red Truck

Austin Walne — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:23:48 -0400

On the Fred Thompson campaign, late in the game we were raising less money than we needed to make a substantial TV buy in Iowa and then South Carolina. The decision was made to deploy the eCampaign's idea of the "Red Truck" flash animation. Todd Zeigler discussed this previously.

http://www.bivingsreport.com/2008/does-good-design-matter-an-anecdote-fr...

Once live, our online fundraising was fully transparent. The flash piece automatically pulled the fundraising numbers directly from our database in almost real time. The only reason it wasn't fully real time was because of our hosting situation. We ran the main site on a 3 server cluster; and we ran into an issue with the animation pulling numbers from different servers. Thus, if you sat and hit the refresh button constantly you might get slightly different numbers for a few seconds.

Show Us Some Real Money, Hillary!

Micah L. Sifry — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:54:01 -0400

As I suspected, the "Hillary raised $10 million online overnight" report that the Washington Post ran with earlier today was too good to be true. I don't know if the mistake is the reporter's or if someone at Camp Hillary was spinning a bit too fast, but there's no way they raised that much since her win in Pennsylvania yesterday.