techPresident - online fundraising - Comments

Community organizers

orgnet — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:58:21 -0400

Community organizing goes back to the founding of this country and the coming together to defeat King George and the British...

http://www.networkweaving.com/blog/2008/09/network-weavers-as-community-...

Distributive Computing

gibson_stevens — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:18:27 -0400

Great article and very interesting concept. I have been thinking of this in a different manner. As this Cognitive Surplus, as Shirky aptly names it, is engaged, how do we improve the management and usefullness of what is generated? The idea of distributive computing came to mind. Each of us individually becomes a member of the cloud, processing and contributing to the greater brain.

This idea flies in the face of the old adage that "a person is smart, but people are dumb." With an engaged cognitive surplus managed in a distributive manner, a person will become dumb in comparison to the intelligence of a connected and engaged people...

More of my musings...

Good points

Luigi Montanez — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:49:19 -0400

@Micah: You have a great point, and the seemingly singular focus on Obama did worry me throughout 2007. But I think in recent months, Obama's shown some Democratic coattails in a few down-ballot special elections, and more importantly, he's tweaked his language in recent weeks to be more about the Democratic party and less about his movement. I think once people get the activism bug, they're hooked for a while. Can't way to see Clay at PdF.

@echoWhiskey: You're right, I should have explained that number a bit more. From my first-hand experience in general cases, about 10% of people who give an email address will go the full distance, furnish a password, and create an account on a website. Obviously, the Obama campaign is an exceptional case, and many people created an account as their first step (which automatically added them to the email list), so it may be a higher percentage. If MoveOn.org has 3 million on their list, I think Obama's list being 2x or 3x larger feels about right. But that's just all conjecture on my part.

Hands-on politics indeed

cfinnie — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:57:01 -0400

To tell the truth, this is one of two reasons why I voted for Obama (even though, as an older white woman, the media tells me I'm supposed to be a Clinton supporter). The other was the number of young voters he was bringing into the process. But bringing voters of whatever age into the process to me was key. Howard Dean, who brought me into the process, likes to say that showing up to vote only gets you a "D" in citizenship (not even doing that, of course, gets you an "F"). If you want to do better, you have to work for a candidate or run for office. He actively encouraged us to take back our power as citizens with his his signature line, "Only you have the power...." Obama is doing the same. And you're so right, the beltway boys just don't get it. Because of that, some of the '06 freshman class in Congress will fail in '08. They've forgotten how they got elected, signed on with the clueless consultants, are running very different campaigns, and I predict will fail. To use Shirky's analogy, they've gone back to watching Gilligan's Island--not recognizing that the shift is permanent. Dean does. And so does Obama.

8 million?

echoWhiskey — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:16:14 -0400

Agreed on the limited thinking of old-school consultants in terms of what Barack's database really means. But, I'm interested in the metrics that you use to extrapolate 800,000 memberships on my.barackobama.com into an 8 million person email list. Almost every action on the Obama website either directs you to become a member or directly makes you a member, so I would guess that the membership rate on the email list is much higher than 10%. Can you explain?

surplus desire, indeed

Micah L. Sifry — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:53:29 -0400

Luigi:
You nailed it.
But we still don't know if Obama's movement thinks this way...or if everyone will put their surplus back into their private lives if he wins.
Micah
p.s. cognitive surplus is to free time, as meme is to idea.
Not to dis Clay: I love him and is keynoting at PdF 2008 this June.

Look at 2/5

AlchemyToday — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:18:02 -0400

Clinton's fundraising claims in the last two days are essentially identical (slightly multiplied) from her claims on and after Super Tuesday. Her tactics for getting donors was exactly the same. So, check out the reports on what donations she actually received on Super Tuesday and odds are the reality:rhetoric ratio for those donations are similar to what's going on now.

What fraction of her 2/5-2/8 haul came from small, online donations? It was certainly the intent of the campaign to make it look like most of it was, but that was never made explicit. How much was earmarked for the general? Etc. The data's out there for 2/5 and the the extent you can judge Daou's words now is determined by how much spin there was to his numbers then, since he was saying the exact same things during that fundraising push.

Even $100 for an average

Marco Carbone — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:49:31 -0400

Even $100 for an average donation is suspect, especially since the Clinton was pushing for $5 donations. My guess is that the point of the $5 dollar push was to inflate the new donor count, in order to mask maximum donations coming from her usual pool of donors and raising the average donation. The answers to two questions to the Clinton campaign would make this clear:

1) How much of the $10 million is for the primary vs. the national election?

2) Rather than the average, what was the *median* donation during the post-PA period?

Hillary Spin

Mr. X — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:49:09 -0400

+9. She won by +9. This is a site that requires participants to answer an addition problem?

Hillary Spin

eagleye — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:29:47 -0400

Somehow the Clinton camp has managed to get the corporate media to buy into the notion that she has enjoyed spectacular success in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. She once had whopping big leads in those states, yet Obama walked away with more delegates in Texas, and she only came up +10 in Pennsylvania, a state that was demographically tailor-made for her campaign. Yet somehow the results from these states gets reported as "game-changing."

Oy.

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.

---
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.

###

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.

A big thanks...

Luigi Montanez — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:54:08 -0400

A big thanks goes to the editors of techPresident for inviting me to share my thoughts here. More of my ramblings on the intersection of technology and politics can be found at Leftmost Bit.