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Archive for the 'Online Fundraising' Category

Barack Obama and Wikipedia are More Alike Than You Think

Published by William Beutler on January 12, 2009 in Barack Obama, E-mail, Mitt Romney, Online Fundraising, Swag, Tech Blogosphere, Website Design, White House '08, White House '12, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 15 Comments

I don’t know if most readers here would think that Wikipedia’s best-covered politician and Google’s best-listed website are all that similar, but I don’t think you can write it off entirely.

My reason for thinking so began after Mickey Kaus checked his e-mail inbox late last week, and asked:

Will Obama ever stop asking me for money? Or is it all fundraising, all the way out? … Not only is he still milking his supporters for money, he’s doing it in an obnoxious way, no? “Join us at the inauguration” turns out to mean “pay for other people to party at the inauguration you’re not going to”!

He’s got a point there. I’ve been on Obama’s list for more than a year now — my first post of 2008 was about how Obama’s campaign sent the year’s first campaign e-mail that New Years Day wee morning hours — and I’ve been getting (and half-paying attention to) them ever since. Here is my unofficial count (and anyone is welcome to do a recount) of the e-mails “Paid for by Obama for America” I have received in 2009, followed by that ubiquitous red button:

  • Join us at the Inauguration, Jan. 3, Obama for America
  • Our first guest, Jan. 6, Michelle Obama
  • Be there for history, Jan. 7, Bill Clinton
  • Deadline: Midnight, Jan. 8, Barack Obama
  • Re: Midnight deadline, Jan. 8, David Plouffe
  • Your call to service, Jan. 12, Michelle Obama

It’s a permanent campaign, all right.

He’s not President of the United States yet, I’ll give him that. But you would tend to think his fundraising goals have been satisfied — especially since his campaign let departing staffers have an extra month’s paycheck, plus their laptops and BlackBerrys (and a tip of the hat to Research in Motion’s PR department for getting reporters following AP style to not spell it “Blackberries”).

And you know what this reminds me of, as it might not remind most inside the Beltway? It’s not altogether unlike Wikipedia’s constant fundraising. As recently as December, Valleywag criticized the Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales-led on-site (always a banner across the top) fundraising drive mostly for being annoying and evidentiary of Wales being a poor leader of the website with the most comprehensive description of Regional variations of barbecue.

By early January, however, it turned out that Wikipedia had beaten its 2008 fundraising goals to the tune of $6.2 million. In the interests of disclosure as well as narrative, I’ll say that I donated as much to the Wikimedia Foundation this winter as I’ve donated in any one instance since Hurricane Katrina. So with that said, as I’ve been editing Wikipedia recently, I have often noticed this banner at the top of each article:

And what happens when you click on it? You come to a page with a letter of thanks from Wales. It looks like this:

Okay, so maybe Valleywag has a point about Wales as the public face of the website with the most informative biography of Portland, Oregon home furnishings salesman and television pitchman Tom Peterson.

And then, your eye drifts down the page to see this:

The permanent campaign, indeed.

P.S. I haven’t even mentioned that also this afternoon, Mitt Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC was asking $100 for this:

Don’t even get me started.

A Glimpse at the Future of Twitter Fundraising

Published by William Beutler on December 17, 2008 in Midterms '10, Online Campaigns, Online Fundraising, Republicans, Social Networking, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 4 Comments

Twitter experienced another milestone last week, although you may not have noticed: Tweet for Chuck, a fundraising drive organized by the nascent campaign of Chuck DeVore, a California state assemblyman who is gearing up to take on Barbara Boxer in 2010. As far as I can discern, this is the first time Twitter has been put to this use.

Although it’s very early yet in the cycle, the last few weeks have seen a big jump in use of Twitter by conservatives, if the just-launched TCOT website (aggregating and ranking conservative tweeters) is any measure. The move should give DeVore some degree of online cred and visibility that few candidates yet have — at least among conservatives, and at this stage they matter most.

The image below, from the front page of the website, explains how it works better than any summary I could offer:

Further down the page, donors are listed along with their Twitter profile picture, the amount they donated or pledged, and whether other donors had listed them as a referrer:

By tweeting the donation to one’s Twitter followers, the campaign gets a free one-time use of that donor’s account and the chance to solicit additional donors. The same network effects that made Twitter even more conducive to passing along news about the Mumbai terror attacks than perhaps even the blogosphere could end up producing a tool more effective for fundraising than blogging as well.

Twitter is a more intimate experience than blogging, so a candidate on Twitter (as DeVore is) can to some extent simulate the access donors frequently get at traditional fundraising dinners. A candidate couldn’t really be expected to write a whole blog post thanking specific donors, but a tweet is just the right vehicle for such acknowledgment, and DeVore’s campaign has been doing just that.

Moreover, DeVore is on the right track so far, working with blogosphere and political veterans Josh Trevino and then Justin Hart and even contributing blog posts at the recently-launched GOP state blog network Red County.

It’s been said before that political movements tend to innovate in fundraising and message delivery when they’re out of power. With Barack Obama’s Twitter account recently falling silent while DeVore is taking it in a new direction, we might just be seeing that happen already.

Update: Don’t miss DeVore’s comment on this post.

Hillary Needs Me (And You)

Published by William Beutler on June 25, 2008 in #pdf2008, E-mail, Fundraising, Hillary Clinton, Online Fundraising, White House '08, White House '12 and William Beutler. 1 Comment

My last post, written from an auditorium on the fifth floor of the AOL Time Warner Center, was a little on the snarky side about the fact that two weeks after the formal suspension of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, she is still sending e-mails to her massive list.

Hillary’s third e-mail since leaving the raceLater in the day, I attended a panel discussion with my colleague Soren Dayton and Peter Daou, who still remains Senator Clinton’s Internet advisor. Afterward I spoke with Daou briefly, and I mentioned the post and asked him about their e-mail plans. He confirmed that they indeed planned to continue sending e-mails to the list.

They didn’t wait long.

At right is the image from an e-mail I received late this morning. Not surprisingly, it’s an appeal for help paying down the campaign’s debt — about $22 million, $12 million of which she loaned herself. So I expect I’ll be getting more than a few of these over the coming weeks. But I promise I’ll only write about it again if it’s really interesting.

P.S. One more shout-out to Daou for helping me write Hillary in Blogistan: On Blogads, The Netroots and Peter Daou upon the campaign’s official launch January 2007. Yes it made him look good, but as a senior-level staffer of the front-running Democratic candidate, he was certainly under no obligation to speak with a right-of-center blogger about the campaign.

Let’s Just Admit Slatecard is the Republican ActBlue

Published by William Beutler on May 26, 2008 in Blog Consultants, Fundraising, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Online Campaigns, Online Fundraising, RedState, Republicans, Startups, Technology, White House '08 and William Beutler. 5 Comments

In the past week or so, two online GOP operatives (neither of whom is David All) have separately suggested to me that the competition among the three Republican Internet fundraising websites is effectively over. Even I doubted the separation would happen this quickly, but as of now even a late push by one of the two laggards would have a hard time catching on.

Evidence that Slatecard, bootstrapped project of Republican consultant David All (and web developer Sendhil Panchadsaram), is “the Republican ActBlue” can be found throughout mainstream political coverage over the past six months. Here are just a few:

Campaigns and Elections:

Then why the development of small donor online vehicles, including the Democratic ActBlue and Republican Slatecard, that aim to raise small donations on the congressional level? Both tools are growing substantially, and several candidates for Congress are highlighted on those sites.

USA Today:

“Your average online donor is an impulse buyer,” said David All, a Washington, D.C.-based consultant who last year founded Slatecard.com, which he hopes to be a Republican answer to ActBlue. So far, the site’s donors have raised more than $5,000 for GOP presidential candidates.

Wall Street Journal [$]:

Mr. All, the Republican consultant, started a rival site last October called SlateCard.com. It has raised just $300,000. “What I’m finding is a lot of Republican campaigns are just hiring college kids or using their son who has a Facebook account,” said the 28-year-old Mr. All. “They don’t understand what this is all about.”

Human Events:

Slatecard aims to raise money for Republican candidates in the same way that ActBlue has for Democrats. Slatecard lets users create profiles (“slatecards”) for candidates they support and then raise money by donating to that candidate and passing it on to friends, family members, co workers — anyone — through blogs, emails, and social networking groups.

Wired:

“If you read the statute, the result is not surprising,” said Don McGahn, an attorney who advises Slatecard, the Republicans’ answer to ActBlue. “However, when they passed the statute, there wasn’t even the internet … what it really shows is that the way to fix this is to pass legislation to update the Matching Payment Act .”

While Slatecard is more elegant, interactive and transparent than its counterparts, it seems that All’s sometimes controversial self-promotion has made the lion’s share of difference, especially as he has succeeded in persuading local congressional campaigns to use his site, sometimes making it their exclusive online fundraising platform.

RedState, former backer of Big Red Tent, now supports SlatecardBut if you need further evidence that Slatecard is the take-all (no pun intended) winner of the online GOP fundraising tool primary, consider the image at right, taken from the sidebar of leading Republican activist site RedState. It’s a Slatecard widget encouraging contributions to the McCain camapign.

It’s noteworthy not just for being there but for what it replaces: Nearly a year ago, RedState announced it was backing one of the future also-rans, Big Red Tent:

Patrick Ruffini has said more than once that the right needs to stop building what the left already has and instead build the next big thing. As part of heading in that direction, please let me introduce you to the Big Red Tent. We didn’t build it, but we’re actively supporting it.

There is more irony here: Ruffini is chiefly responsible for the other runner-up, Rightroots, and RedState’s Erick Erickson was party to a minor internecine fight with All during the Republican primary season. To back All’s Slatecard over Big Red Tent may have been a difficult choice, but considering how the other two have languished, it may have been no choice at all.

Update: David writes to say that 48 candidates now have used Slatecard exclusively for online fundraising, though some have already lost their primary or special elections. That’s impressive, especially for a site not yet nine months old.

Four Blogs, Two Candidates and One Year Later

Published by William Beutler on May 7, 2008 in Barack Obama, Blog Consultants, Daily Kos, Defections, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Instapundit, John Edwards, John McCain, Netroots, Online Fundraising, Primary fights, White House '08, White House '12 and William Beutler. Closed

Balloon Juice, The Daily Dish, MyDD and Taylor Marsh

Three’s a trend, and this is Blog P.I.’s third post in a row leaning on juxtapositions; this time, the subject of two posts from late 2006 and early 2007 have converged in a way I certainly couldn’t have imagined at the time. Both were about bloggers’ attitudes toward the presidential campaign then still taking shape, and if one can make any definitive predictions in politics, it’s that you can never make definitive predictions about the future. And this is all the more true on the morning after the primaries in North Carolina and Indiana.

  • In October ‘06 it was The Agony and the Apostasy, about the leftward drift of two well-known (onetime) conservative bloggers, Andrew Sullivan and John Cole. Sullivan claims to believe everything today that he believed in the early 2000s, but the day-to-day effect of his blogging is pretty much the opposite. Cole has gone from a Republican supporter of the Iraq war to a sarcastic critic of all things Republican.
  • Then in January 2007, Hillary in Blogistan: On Blogads, the Netroots and Peter Daou, a lengthy reported piece about the Internet advertising campaign directed by Daou, coinciding with the official launch of Clinton’s presidential bid. That post also explored Nevada blogger Taylor Marsh’s incensed reaction to being excluded from the original ad buy. This post also referred to MyDD as “one of the leading anti-Hillary sites on the left.”

So how much does a year change? Quite a bit. The 2006 post wondered about which way the two apostates would break in the 2008 race:

It seems plausible that Sullivan and Cole could support a Republican for president alongside their erstwhile compatriots, but probably not until after the primary is decided.

My answer, hedging as it was, does not seem to have stood the test of time.

  • In the year and a half since, Sullivan has moved his blog from Time to The Atlantic and, in concert with his recent criticism of the Republican Party and conservative movement overall, he has become one of the most prominent supporters of Barack Obama. So much so that The Atlantic published a December cover essay by Sullivan presumptuously titled “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters.” On the Republican side, Sullivan had preferred McCain over the runners-up, in large part based on McCain’s opposition to the Bush administration’s torture/interrogation policies. Of course, Obama holds the same opinion. Sullivan was no doubt pleased with last night’s results in North Carolina and Indiana, but one cannot escape the sense that he’ll miss the Clintons.
  • Cole, meanwhile, has become an even more constant, if not more ardent, supporter of Obama’s candidacy. Like Sullivan a former 1990s conservative, he acquired no later appreciation for Hillary Clinton. And like Sullivan, he now sees her worse attributes similar to what he doesn’t like about the modern Republican party. He remains a member of the Pajamas Media advertising network which is run and largely populated by right-of-center blogs such as Instapundit and Protein Wisdom. But now he’s also been using the Democrat-oriented ActBlue website to raise money for Obama (and Obama alone) which probably makes him the only blog simultaneously affiliated with both Pajamas Media and ActBlue. As for the primary results, Cole was exultant, apparently staying up most of the night blogging the results.

Clearly, neither are rejoining the Republican camp anytime soon. More interesting, though, is what’s happened with Taylor Marsh and MyDD.

  • At the time, Marsh was leaning strongly toward Edwards and was unimpressed by Clinton. But regardless of her displeasure with the Clinton campaign’s ad buy, barely two months later she had changed her mind and made the case for Clinton. Even before then, her site had started to turn anti-Obama, especially after he dissed her home state by skipping an AFSCME-sponsored presidential forum in Carson City. Since then, she has been one of the most ardent pro-Clinton bloggers and one of the most committed Democratic opponents of Obama. And only just this morning, with the primary results clear, is Marsh shifting again: recognizing that Clinton cannot win, she will oppose John McCain without making the case for Obama.
  • Meantime, MyDD has undergone even bigger changes than the other three. In this case it wasn’t a change of mind, but a change of bloggers: in July of last year, the two principal authors, Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, decamped for an entirely new website: Open Left. Their new blog has now become a new leading anti-Hillary site, as MyDD once was. Meanwhile, MyDD has shifted back to reflecting the opinion of the site’s original founder, Jerome Armstrong. Armstrong stepped up his own blogging and brought in a new contributor, pro-Hillary Todd Beeton. Armstrong had previously been a consultant to Mark Warner, former governor of (and all-but-guaranteed future senator from) Virginia, but since he exited the presidential race more than a year ago, Armstrong has become an unflinching proponent of Hillary Clinton. So much so, in fact, that it has been the source of conflict between Armstrong and his former co-author Markos Moulitsas, to say nothing of the wider leftosphere. Today, Armstrong is sounding a little more apathetic than Marsh, merely affirming that the Clinton campaign has the right to continue on.

Taken as a whole, the four websites defy categorization, dissimilar in cause and effect, except in that their content has changed dramatically over time. And I am sure that whether McCain or Obama takes the oath of office next January, I don’t want to make any predictions about which candidates each site will be supporting in 2012.

Lost in McCainSpace

Published by William Beutler on April 4, 2008 in John McCain, Online Fundraising, Social Networking, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 3 Comments

A little over a year ago, I wrote a deservedly unkind and undeservedly lengthy post about John McCain’s social network-in-name-only. It was essentially just a personalized donation page, glorified by its socnet-ish name: McCainSpace. Or MyMcCain. That part hadn’t been sorted out by its launch.

In any case, that was then. I hadn’t been back since (who thought back then there would be a McCain campaign right now?) and recently decided that a follow-up might be in order. So what is it now?

It’s exactly the same. The McCain campaign website doesn’t seem to have much interest in making their website into a real destination. As I said then, a campaign does not need a social network of its own, but if you’re going to claim one, actually have one.

Actually, something has changed with the profile I used to illustrate the problem last year. It’s Debaser, the Un Chien Andalou/Black Francis-inspired username of Todd Zeigler at Bivings Group. Here’s the image I posted last year:

The page is unchanged, with one exception. Here’s the detail:

Debaser pulls in $100 for John McCain

Granted, $100 is not a lot, for a presidential campaign or the fourteen months between the first screen shot and the second. But for a website that’s essentially abandoned, it’s a fortune.

I asked Zeigler if he had donated, or knew who had. The first word of his reply: “Weird.” Zeigler logged in and found out that the donor hailed from the Delmarva Peninsula and was not known to him. In an e-mail reply he allowed me to share, Zeigler offered two possibilities:

(1) [Name Redacted] stumbled across my page (or blog post) and gave through it.
(2) Funny business.

I’m going with (1) but for Debaser to reach its assigned goal, (2) may have to get involved.

The February 7th Sign or: Stop This Train, I Want to Get On

Published by William Beutler on January 31, 2008 in Barack Obama, Blog Consultants, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Online Fundraising, Republicans, Twitter, White House '08 and William Beutler. 3 Comments

Patrick Ruffini has announced a new Rightroots-branded initiative called February7.org. The premise is simple: Republicans are likely to have a presumptive nominee by the morning after the morning after Super Tuesday (Tsunami Tuesday for you First Read fanboys and girls). This primary has not been as ugly as the Democrats’, but it has been ideologically dispiriting, mostly featuring candidates who fell short of conservative ideals. An early fundraising push could help rally the GOP while the Democrats are still fighting amongst themselves.

That nominee is most likely to be John McCain, while Ruffini has switched his support from “Rudy to Romney,” as he put it Tuesday night. Therefore, the most likely scenario is he will have to grudgingly switch again in about a week. If the move is a painful one for many, better then to get it over with. But there’s more to it, as he explains in the announcement on his own site:

You can probably tell that I have strong views about this nomination contest. Win or lose, I’m equally convinced of the importance of getting behind the eventual winner. A nation at war cannot afford Hillary or Obama in the White House. …

Beyond just showing support for our nominee, we’re doing this to help solve a concrete strategic problem for our Party during the month of February.

The simple fact is that when it comes to contributions from others, our candidates are broke. They’ve spent it all on Florida. No one is up on TV in any February 5th state, while Hillary and Obama have money to burn (I saw Clinton ads in California last weekend). Based on the fact that they have money to play with and have held a fundraising advantage throughout the cycle, there is a chance they could start pummeling our candidate with negative ads right away.

If we fundraise the same old traditional way — with fundraising events and direct mail early and banking on Internet enthusiasm late — we will lose. There is no way we’ll be able to get the money when and where we need it. On the Internet in particular, contributions come in late, often too late for the money to be spent effectively. We’re hoping to help frontload some of this money so that the candidate can use it against Hillary/Obama right away. When it comes to giving, early is the new late.

Well said. But for my money, the best part of the website is that one can toggle between “Stop Hillary” and “Stop Obama,” not unlike a blog that lets you change the background color:

Stop Hillary at February7.org             Stop Obama at February7.org

Please notice that no “Stop Edwards” version was created.

P.S. I first heard about this through a Twitter account Ruffini set up last week: Twitter.com/February7. I followed the account back, but of 111 users Ruffini followed, only 13 followed it back. That 11.7% rate would be terrific if it was direct mail, but it isn’t that. Twitter marketing has been the focus of much discussion over the past year, but here is some evidence that the medium strongly favors established personalities — Ruffini is one, but @February7 is not. And setting up new Twitter accounts is fun, but not all that effective.

What If They Held a Federal Election and No One Noticed?

Published by William Beutler on December 12, 2007 in 50 State Strategy, 527s, Congress, Daily Kos, Elections, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Local Politics, Midterms '06, Online Fundraising, RNC, RedState, Special Election, Virginia Politics and William Beutler. Closed

Last night Republicans retained two House seats in special elections called to replace members who passed away earlier this year. This morning, Captain Ed led his recap with the observation:

Had the Republicans lost their two special election contests to replace deceased GOP House members, one would see the papers filled with analyses of the coming debacle for Republican hopes in 2008. Now that they have won both handily, expect most to either ignore the races altogether or chalk up the wins to local Republican strength.

Indeed, about the closer-watched Ohio election the Washington Post merely ran an AP story on A02; the Viriginia story ran on B05 in the Metro section. Neither buried, but neither featured. Had Weirauch had won, the anti-Republican mood of ‘06 would seem to be continuing. So it’s kind of funny where the Post chose to cut off the wire report:

But Democrats had high hopes about Weirauch’s chances against the younger Latta. This was her third run for the House, and last year, against Gillmor, she received the biggest share of the vote — 43 percent — of any Democrat in the district’s history.

I noticed the same dearth of barking from the blogs, too. Here’s everything the Memeorandum algorithm deemed significant this morning:

Memeorandum recap of December 2007 special elections

And the whole story was off the page by the beep of twelve.

Daily Kos featured just one recap of the special election, which seemed very bitter even after explaining how the NRCC had spent a big chunk of its cash on hand:

The Republicans are still trying to pretend that 2006 was an aberration. Yet they have to go all-out, it seems, to hold the ground they already have.

Yes, I was hoping for a better performance in this district. Yes, I’m disappointed.

Meanwhile, the RNC’s Jason Richardson said nyah in a post for GOP.com and at RedState, focused not on the party committees, but on the extra-party support apparatus:

Weirauch had heavy support from the DCCC, Daily Kos, Act Blue, Nancy Pelosi, Charlie Rangel, Harry Reid, and EMILY’s LIST. We were severely out-manned in Ohio and Virginia and this is what they have to show for it? We came to the game to win. All in all, the liberal blogosphere should take heed: You’re not as powerful as you think and it’s about results not PR.

To be sure, these were retentions and the Virginia election was never much of a contest. But the Ohio race between Republican Bob Latta and Democrat Robin Weirauch was a focal point of both parties in recent weeks, with both parties’ house committees pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the district. Online, Slatecard and Big Red Tent both spotlighted the race and sent out fundraising pleas; Slatecard raised $1,908 from 21 supporters. Meanwhile Weirauch apparently collected more than $93,000 from ActBlue, some $15,600 raised by the Daily Kos/Open Left-backed Blue Majority and $12,300 by Wesley Clark’s WesPAC.

One race was obviously a dud and the other would prove to be one, too. It’s hard to nationalize a special election, and there was no Paul Hackett. In fact, there was barely an Iraq debate — though the Democrat in the Viriginia race, Philip Forgit, was an Iraq veteran. So the leftroots raised more money, but the rightroots (if not Rightroots) ended up with the win. But neither the leftosphere nor rightosphere owns this win or loss. This race just wasn’t won or lost online. And if it was a status quo election, Republicans have to be pleased with that.

Update: I somehow managed to miss Eric Pfeiffer’s understated observation, posted just after the beep-beep of twelve-thirty:

Bloggers Respond With Restraint to Yesterday’s OH/VA Special Elections

At least.

Blog P.I. Gets Results! Plus, More Thoughts on GOP Online Fundraising

Published by William Beutler on December 9, 2007 in Midterms '10, Online Fundraising, Religion, Republicans, Rhetoric, Terrorism and White House '08. 1 Comment

In a post evaluating the three competing GOP online fundraising tools last weekend, and I criticized the “Defeat Radical Islam” issue badge on Slatecard for overlaying the Star and Crescent with the Universal No symbol. This weekend, Slatecard’s David All has updated the badge. Replacing Islam’s holy symbol is now a pair of crossed AK-47s. Old and new:

Old “Defeat Radical Islam” badge               New “Defeat Radical Islam” badge

I suppose it is possible the good people at Izhevsk Mechanical Works will object, but I doubt it would matter if they did. Not that the old badge necessarily ran the risk of inciting politically-motivated riots in the Arab street (although one never knows) but it sent the wrong message. The new one is also unlikely to move the NRA. Good thing they have a sense of humor, and good thing All made the change.

Meanwhile, during the week I discussed the three utilities — Slatecard plus Rightroots and Big Red Tent with a smart conservative who argued that a) the movement needs to settle on just one, b) social features are not all that important, and c) what does matter is enabling state-level fundraising.

To take the last point first, I couldn’t agree more. Just as building state-level blogs is crucial to conveying information, so too is it important to lower the barriers to making financial contributions. State governments rarely make news here in DC, but decisions that matter to most people’s lives occur at that level, there are simply more of these races, and winners of those campaigns often go on to compete in federal elections. Making this happen 50 times over is a formidable challenge. ActBlue didn’t always do this, but now they do. My guess is that whomever on the right does this first will emerge as the go-to website.

Moving backward to the second point, it’s a fair point that people are unlikely to visit these sites with money burning a hole in their pocket, just looking for a candidate to support. Including a great deal of information about the candidates is not the most important thing these websites do. Those decisions will be made offline and influenced by bloggers who already command an audience. Yet I still think a fundraising widget would make such donations more likely, that good information and cross-referencing between issues and candidates can encourage more political giving. If you are primarily motivated by winning the Iraq war or promoting federalist solutions, you may be likely to throw a bit of money at candidates you hadn’t planned on — but only if you know to do so. How about a feature, similar to Amazon.com’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” feature? How about “Donors Who Gave to This Candidate Also Gave To”?

First point last: I said before that I think different mechanisms could be adopted by different segments of the party, but I cannot deny the logic of consolidating support behind just one of them — efficiency matters, and I think reinforces my second point. That said, I do not think there need be any rush to get behind just one. Competition among them should eventually produce one that’s better than the others. Maybe that happens in 2008, but I think the separation will occur during the ‘10 midterms.

Rightroots, Big Red Tent and Slatecard: An Assessment

Published by William Beutler on December 3, 2007 in Blog Consultants, Brick-and-mortar consultants, Campaigns, Charts and Graphs, Fred Thompson, Internecine Battles, Online Campaigns, Online Fundraising, Republicans, Social Networking, Startups, Trend Tool, Twitter, White House '08 and William Beutler. 4 Comments

Logos for Slatecard, Rightroots and Big Red Tent

Online fundraising startups are a longstanding interest of Blog P.I. In our year and a half, we’ve devoted more than a few posts to the subject, including the progressive, Democrat-supporting ActBlue, the conservative, Republican-aligned newcomer ABC PAC/Rightroots, attendant security issues and flawed coverage often (but not exclusively) in the Washington Post. The last time I wrote about it, Rightroots had relaunched, and two similar Republican fundraising startups — Big Red Tent and Slatecard — were announced and on the way shortly.

Now, all three have been up for more than a month, which I think is enough time to make an early comparative assessment.

For those playing at home: Rightroots is a reboot of the ABC PAC/Rightroots slate that saw a trial run fairly late in the 2006 cycle, controlled by McCain adviser Becki Donatelli, former Giuliani Patrick Ruffini and Mike Turk, an outside adviser to the Thompson campaign. Big Red Tent is an outside-the-beltway venture by a pair of Austin, Texas web consultants Ryan Gravatt and Brad Jackson. Slatecard is the brainchild primarily of ubiquitous DC Internet guy David All and web developer Sendhil Panchadsaram (who strangely has no website that I can find).

Last weekend, I signed up for each one and made some nominal contributions. Since then, I’ve continued poking and prodding. I thought about putting together an elaborate chart comparing their features side-by-side. Perhaps in a future post I will, but for now, but I don’t think that gives as clear a picture of what I thought about them. Instead, this post collects my observations, with screen captures. It’s a long one, so I’ve tucked the rest of this post below the fold. Follow me…

Continue reading ‘Rightroots, Big Red Tent and Slatecard: An Assessment’