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Archive for the 'Online Fundraising' Category

Fundraising Awareness

Published by William Beutler on August 16, 2007 in Blog Consultants, Fundraising, John McCain, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, MSM, Online Fundraising, RedState, Republicans and Startups. 3 Comments

Earlier in the week Matthew Mosk, a political reporter for the Washington Post, posted to Post.com’s The Trail an arguably unhelpful and inarguably un-insightful post about the disparate fates of the best-known online fundraising apparatuses (apparati?) of Democrats and Republicans:

Democratic candidates for federal office have seen more than $25 million come through the web site ActBlue — some of which will eventually flow to the Democratic National Committee for use during the general election. Republicans, meanwhile, have seen just a tiny ripple of activity on the ABC PAC web site — $385 raised for the presidential candidates to date — which is supposed to be ActBlue’s direct competition.

Sure, at one time it was supposed to be. But as this blog and other blogs have pointed out, it’s never had the kind of support such that it should actually be spoken of in the same sentence. Not to mention that several journalists, including Mosk’s colleague Chris Cillizza, have (apparently ignorantly) misrepresented what ActBlue means to different Democratic candidates.

Mosk’s brief report is of a piece with this, not knowing or bothering to differentiate between the two websites. Is it fair to point out that Democrats are doing better with their independent online fundraising tools? Absolutely. Is it fair to compare ActBlue’s total fundraising figures over three cycles compared to ABC’s (admittedly underwhelming) year in existence? Not without explaining the situation, it’s not.

But it gets worse:

Now there is a new effort to change that. R. Rebecca Donatelli, a pioneer of Internet fundraising who help raise some of the nation’s first online dollars for John McCain in 2000, has revealed she and partner Michael Palmer are working on a new, and she hopes improved, version of ABC PAC to launch this fall. While she continues to work on behalf of McCain, she said she is optimistic the improvements to ABC PAC will help all of the Republican candidates. Given the numbers they are posting on the site right now, it would be tough to make things worse.

This “new effort,” as Mosk doesn’t adequately explain, is a second go at the same operation by the same person responsible for ABC’s ineffectiveness. Worse, though, Mosk is apparently unaware of other new ventures by GOP activists in the same space. Even before Mosk’s posting, there were two new efforts gearing up to do same thing:

Both sites have yet to prove themselves, sure. But considering that Mr. Mosk was moved to write a post about ABC PAC, isn’t this worth an correction? Or better yet — another post?

Hey, This Rudy Giuliani Site Isn’t Half Bad

Published by William Beutler on March 27, 2007 in Facebook, Online Campaigns, Online Fundraising, Republicans, Rudy Giuliani, Web video, Website Design and White House '08. 3 Comments

The new website for Rudy Giuliani went live last week, and what was an attractive if perfunctory placeholder has now become an attractive and functional website. This shouldn’t be too surprising — when Bush-Cheney ‘04 blogmeister Patrick Ruffini announced in January that he was joining the Giuliani ‘08 team, that was a good sign the campaign would have a pretty decent website. And it is more than that — but it’s also not without flaws. So let’s take a look:

Join Rudy 2008 The Buzz

Is The Buzz is just a round-up of favorable coverage? Sure, but unlike the news feed from every other top-tier candidate, here the MSM and blogs coexist as equals. Romney’s page does link to favorable blog posts, but segregates them from the proper journalists; the others don’t link to bloggers at all. The Buzz also includes a quasi-Digg counter keeping track of how many times a story has been clicked. I assume this is imported from Ruffini’s 2008 Wire. Neither feature prevents a single user from clicking on a story multiple times to artificially inflate its relative significance. That’s a flaw on Ruffini’s own site, but not so much here.

Join Rudy 2008 widget

A fundraising widget? Now we’re talking. Other candidates will let you sign up to become a fundraiser, but only the Giuliani campaign makes it as easy as cut-and-paste. In contrast, the Romney campaign makes you join TEAM MITT before they’ll let you at their fundraising tool, the cumbersomely-titled QuickComMITT. Hillary wants you to sign up before you can send your friends e-mail pitches, and while I haven’t completed the Obama sign-up page, I get the impression it’s an updating thermometer akin to the old Howard Dean “fundraising bat.” All of these campaigns want to keep tabs on their individual fundraisers, but the Giuliani team can do that through this Flash-based widget, too. But most importantly, if you can put a YouTube video on your page, you can raise money for Rudy Giuliani.

Join Rudy 2008 social bookmarking

Ruffini is no great fan of the social bookmarking buttons that litter the bottom of many a blog post, but if the Giuliani campaign is using these ones, he must have decided these are the ones that work. That, or he was overruled. Regardless, Giuliani’s is the only campaign to make these tools standard across the website.

Join Rudy 2008 talk radio

Considering how important talk radio is to the Republican base — and to the Giuliani campaign — this is a good idea. And nobody else has one. Yet the execution and experience leaves something to be desired — the boxes are small, the “Select City” box is unused, and the final readout doesn’t tell you what time the radio programs are on or on what station. Perhaps a prospective caller should already know this, but if so, why bother with this feature? Bottom line: If you want people to volunteer on your behalf, it helps to connect the dots for them.

And now, onto the less-good:

Join Rudy 2008 clutter

So it’s not perfect. I keep getting this dotted outline whenever I click on links from this panel. Not a big deal, but it does disrupt the browsing experience.

Join Rudy 2008 video problems

Now, this is a bigger deal. I got this message at home last night and again at work today. Both connections qualify as “broadband,” I’m on a MacBook Pro and using the latest version of Firefox. What’s a guy gotta do to watch some video around here? Actually, once I finally got the error message to go away (I was starting to wonder if Amazon’s one-click patent was written into McCain-Feingold…) the video worked just fine. On the other hand, it took too long to load. On the other other hand, the now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t controls worked like a charm.

And the best-laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley, but this is still kind of embarrassing:

Republican presidential front-runner Rudy Giuliani’s campaign hurriedly fixed its official Web site late Monday to remove a dangerous design flaw that could have allowed hackers to expose personal information submitted by volunteers.

The vulnerability affecting Giuliani’s site, http://www.JoinRudy2008.com, could have exposed confidential information stored in the campaign’s databases. The Web site failed to block commands that can instruct it to improperly display sensitive information, a popular hacking technique known as “structured query language injection.”

…

“Anybody who knows anything about security could have found these problems in two seconds,” said Marc Maiffret of eEye Digital Security Inc., a researcher who examined Giuliani’s Web site at AP’s request.

Aren’t you glad they didn’t make you sign up to fundraise now? I kid, I kid. So again, it’s a work in progress.

It’s also worth noting what isn’t included. Notably absent are any of the front-page social networking icons that most of the other candidates include. Before My.BarackObama.com and McCainSpace I wouldn’t have thought to mention that there is no social network, but there isn’t one. And there is no blog. A Facebook button wouldn’t kill them, but the one place they really need one is in their social bookmark toolbar — and it is. Meanwhile, a campaign probably doesn’t need to bother with their own blog unless they have a compelling reason to do so. And while I do think a Giuliani-based social network could succeed (call me crazy) it certainly is no requirement.

All in all, not bad. And I bet as the campaign goes forward, it’ll get even better.

Blue in the Face

Published by William Beutler on March 19, 2007 in Blog Consultants, Blog Fights, John Edwards, Online Campaigns and Online Fundraising. 4 Comments

ActBlue seems to be an effective online fundraising tool, but apparently it’s good for something else, too: Hiring them can give casual observers (and even professional reporters) the impression that your campaign is has found El Dorado in the political blogosphere:

Supporters have contributed just $81 toward [Hillary Clinton's] campaign on the affiliated grass-roots funding site ActBlue, compared with well over $1 million for Mr. Edwards.

That comes from Amy Schatz in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, but let’s not pick on her exclusively — as Not Paul Begala pointed out here a few weeks back, Chris Cillizza just made the same mistake at The Fix. Which, ironically, has itself not been fixed.

For those of you just tuning in: ActBlue is no longer just a nifty website that lets bloggers raise money from their own page. No, it has become a full-fledged vendor for legitimate candidates. Edwards is one; Sen. Clinton is not. Every dollar that goes through Edwards’ website gets added to the ActBlue total [Update: Not exactly; see this comment], and not everybody with a keyboard and a credit card is “netroots.”

Attention, readers! If you see other examples of ActBlue fundraising totals for Edwards (or Bill Richardson) being touted as evidence of strength among the online activists, let us know. This notion deserves to be squashed before yet another mainstream political reporter falls victim.

·      ·      ·

Meanwhile, Simon Owens at Bloggasm adds another fifteen seconds to the Edwards blogger fiasco by interviewing the one that got away, Lindsay Beyerstein, who imagines herself in Marcotte’s shoes:

I don’t know whether I would have ultimately resigned or not. I don’t think so–unless I was under immense pressure to do so from inside the campaign. I’m just stubborn that way. Resigning would have meant conceding. On the other hand, resignation might have been the best thing for the campaign. Personally, I think that the furor would have died down eventually when people realized that a campaign blogger just blogs press releases and not their own stuff.

Assuming that blogger wasn’t concurrently posting at her (or his) own site, perhaps so. And if the first part of her answer didn’t cause visions of a six-week public relations nightmare swallowing the campaign like the Book of Exodus — albeit a less-plausible scenario, as Beyerstein manages to do progressive feminism without the four-letter words — another part of the interview should give pause. The part where she explains how she ended up writing about the experience of her non-experience for Salon:

Amanda wrote about her experiences in Salon. They published one of my photos to illustrate Amanda’s article. So, I emailed Amanda and asked her which editor she worked with for the article. Then, I wrote to the editor and pitched the story.

Just as story was about to go away, no less. With online allies like these, maybe John Edwards should get a dog.

·      ·      ·

I guess now is as good a time as any to revisit the subject of ABC PAC. Earlier this year I criticized the venture as insufficiently derivative of ActBlue, which understandably vexed some of those involved.

As another of those involved, Heritage’s Robert Bluey, put it shortly after,

The folks at ABC PAC should take that advice and start by hiring a full-time executive director on par with Benjamin Rahn, president of ActBlue. Without anyone in charge, ABC PAC is doomed for failure.

As far as I am aware, nothing has changed with the project in the intervening period. So, how is ABC PAC is doing now?

ABC PAC fundraising totals, March 2007

It’s still a centrally-planned draft movement for several candidates who have already entered the race and some who never will (no Fred Thompson, yes Mike Bloomberg?) from the same team that brought you McCain’s phony social network, and the total raised has itself risen just $87 in three months.

The cycle is long and the future is unknown, so I cannot declare the venture a failure. However, it would not be inaccurate to call the website “failing.”

Dear Political Journalists

Published by Not Paul Begala on February 26, 2007 in Democrats, John Edwards, Online Fundraising and White House '08. 4 Comments

Please run a campaign for just one cycle. You’ll learn so much and and you’ll be better at your job. Case in point, Chris Cillizza’s “Battling for Netroots Support” post today:

On Act Blue, one of the premier online bundlers of contributions to Democratic candidates, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) is far and away the first choice. He has received more than 8,000 contributions totaling $900,000. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (N.M.) has taken in $287,000, while a draft effort for Sen. Barack Obama (lll.) contributed $17,0000. (Obama entered the race later than some of his competitors, which may explain the relatively low amount of cash he collected.) It’s also worth nothing that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) had received a single contribution for $1 at the end of January. Since then $40 more dollars have come in.

Chris, did you ask John Edwards if that was his campaign’s primary software vendor for raising money online? If he has super lawyers contributing $4,600 dollars per couple, I hardly think the blogosphere considers that “netroots.” If you click through to his page you see his campaign is the big chunk of that $851,249.96.

Now, for the naysayers out there, I agree 100% that Edwards is a netroots candidate with lots of support from that constituency — more so than the other Democrats in the field. But if that $850K is all in $50 dollar chunks, I’ll be the first to strike this entire post and replace it with “I’m an idiot.” You cannot use an ActBlue total without breakdowns as a proof point of netroots financial support.

People who run campaigns know that ActBlue has morphed from a tool used by the netroots to bundle money into legitimate vendor software for campaigns to manage their online contributions, e.g. NGP or Aristotle.

Just one cycle, that’s all I ask. You might even enjoy yourself.

Blue Harvest?

Published by William Beutler on February 20, 2007 in Democrats, Fundraising, John Edwards, Online Campaigns, Online Fundraising, Oppo Research and White House '08. 8 Comments

During the past holiday weekend, I came into the possession of some very interesting-looking computer screen captures. They were taken at ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising tool and website that for 2008 has matured into a legitimate vendor for two mainstream presidential campaigns.

And the pictures? The screen caps depict a major lapse in network security — one exposing certain member and donor information. In layman’s terms, they left the back door open all weekend. Earlier this afternoon I communicated with ActBlue executive director Ben Rahn, verifying the incident and gathering more information. Here is what went down, based on my limited reporting:

On Friday afternoon, a software developer’s error inadvertantly changed the network security settings, granting administrative-level access to occasional users (i.e., not every account). For example, if you are a normal user and you log in at normal times, this is what the top right-hand corner of the page will look like:

Options for regular ActBlue user

But if you are an administrator — or a normal user this weekend — the top right-hand corner of your page would have looked like:

Options for ActBlue administrator

Anyone who knew enough to be dangerous could get in and change settings or make the site do unpleasant things. But perhaps more worrisome, anyone could now access the Treasury database and start downloading sensitive donor information, in the form of CSV files, showing who had given to whom and how much.

I have a few of these screen shots, just enough to give an idea of what’s there without actually compromising ActBlue further. So, to start, if you click on that Admin link, you would find yourself at the Admin page:

ActBlue Admin page

From there it’s one more click to the Treasury Dashboard showing the actual bank accounts (account numbers blurred, incomplete though they are) ActBlue uses to manage the funds it receives:

ActBlue Treasury Dashboard

And the candidates? Both John Edwards and Bill Richardson use ActBlue to collect their online donations. So here’s the Richardson page:

ActBlue Richardson page

Note the “CSV data” in the furthest-right column. Aside from a prankster turning the site’s color scheme red, that’s where the real trouble lies.

There are a few reasons why this breach is not what it could have been. For one, as Rahn emphasized to me, “To be clear, credit card data is never available from the web site, and thus was never at risk of compromise.” Additionally, CSV (that’s comma-separated values) files can be a bit of a pain, especially if you don’t really know what you’re doing. And of course there is one thing that may have occurred to you already: All of this information will eventually be released to the FEC.

That said, there’s no telling what a rival campaign or unaffiliated opportunist savvy enough to collect and and synthesize this data could do. In the fundraising business, gathering data is difficult. Names, addresses and e-mails would be worth a lot of money to other candidates, political associations or other interested parties. Those names could be cross-referenced against existing lists of donors, and e-mail addresses of known political donors would be a hot property (even if “hot”). Any Senate data would be a huge bonus, because Senate candidates aren’t required to file electronic records with the FEC (and nobody wants to search thousands of PDFs).

So you never know. Maybe it’s something. Maybe it’s nothing. As Rahn told me today:

As it happens, we identified and resolved the problem Sunday morning; it was caused by a developer’s error on Friday afternoon. Your source’s findings essentially describe the “worst case scenario” [that could be caused by this error] … After resolving the prolem we combed through the logs of reports accessed during the window, and the most likely case is that reports were only accessed by those who should have seen them and perhaps a few curious users (such as your source) who might have explored a link they hadn’t seen before and done nothing with the data. However, there is no way for us to completely rule out the contrary cases.

And he assures me that they are “taking steps to ensure that this does not recur,” as one might imagine.

We’ve come a long way since Sandra Bullock pressed Esc and wound up getting chased around “The Net” by a clichéd British villain, and by now most of us are comfortable buying things and donating money online — despite the risks. Security errors are a fact of life. They will be a fact of political life, too.

McCainSpace or MyMcCain? It Hardly Matters

Published by William Beutler on February 18, 2007 in Barack Obama, Blog Consultants, Entertainment, John McCain, Netroots, Online Campaigns, Online Fundraising, Social Networking, Website Design and White House '08. 17 Comments

Two days later, I still haven’t been approved for an account at the official McCain social networking tool. I didn’t sign up under my own name, so perhaps that’s part of it — if nothing else, it matches McCain’s antagonistic legislative approach to the blogosphere. But Todd Zeigler of The Bivings Report got through, as he mentions in the comments. Here’s his page:

What McCainSpace, aka MyMcCain looks like

As he points out, all you can do there is donate, er, raise money and… actually that’s it, unless you count an e-mail form as a feature. Want to customize your page? There’s a single text box, a “Welcome Message,” and the McCain campaign reserves the right to edit or delete it. Want to find other users? Too bad. Maybe a widget or two? Sorry, it isn’t that kind of website. Zeigler at least managed to get a Pixies reference cleared as his user name, but if we’re giving McCain’s people credit for not misinterpreting it, that’s damn faint praise.

In fact, the only thing that’s social or Web 2.0 about this website is the name, and they can’t even get that much straight: it’s McCainSpace on the main page, but MyMcCain on the network itself. That should tell us something about how much thought they’ve put into it.

Writing for techPresident last week, David All counted McCainSpace as a positive:

The same web vendors who implemented mygop.com have turned that tool in to a “social networking” tool for McCain’s campaign. Barack Obama did the same thing, and I would expect every other serious candidate to jump in to the water sooner rather than later. The social network effort on a campaign website will help harness the energy swirling around your campaign, and get people coming back to your website as often as possible.

Except MyGOP failed, and the site as it exists most certainly will not harness any energy that may be swirling about. Compare the dashboard/sidebar from McCain’s “network” to the one from Obama’s:

McCain social network dashboard     Obama social network dashboard

For McCain you can donate money, sign up for e-mails, create a page (technically) and e-mail your friends. With Obama you can personalize your profile, find people like you, promote events, create affinity groups, raise money and even blog. And what more can I say about that B&W color scheme? On the main page McCain alone is in color, which is probably supposed to communicate something about him standing out compared to his rivals — but does it really need to be strictly applied across the entire site?

As the Edwards flap goes to show, campaigns should be careful about branching out into the blogosphere, but pretending to have a social network and a blog when you in fact have neither is a mistake, too.

This may be evidence that the McCain campaign, for whatever reason, doesn’t actually want to engage friendly bloggers. But then, McCain doesn’t exactly have a huge base of online support — which may explain this as a defensive stance, à la HRC. (Other possibilities include staff incompetence and vendor incompetence.)

It also underscores earlier observations that Republicans don’t have an online game like the Democrats. The reason for that probably has a lot to do with the fact that in 2004 there was no Republican scrum and hence no proving ground for online Republican strategists. Mike Turk, Patrick Ruffini and Mindy Finn got their feet wet during Bush-Cheney ‘04 and All picked up a Senate campaign in 2006, but so far GOP strategists haven’t had the same kinds of opportunities as Democratic strategists.

This year there are campaign jobs to be had, in site-building and strategy, so the gap should start to close (though in the short run said lag may only be magnified). What is the Republican equivalent of Blue State Digital or EchoDitto? There isn’t one, and it may be 2012 before there is.

Update: And back over to Zeigler, on the McCain camp’s unresponsiveness to yours truly and to Turk, who adds a different (but not necessarily incompatible) explanation for the lag, in the comments here and at his own Kung Fu Quip.

Why I Deserve Your Money*

Published by Not Paul Begala on January 26, 2007 in Brick-and-mortar consultants, Campaigns, Democrats, Netroots and Online Fundraising. Closed

Chris seems to have a problem with people like me getting money from the blogosphere:

[T]he same Democratic political consultant structure that the netroots seek to reform… is actually being funded, reinforced, and strengthened by the netroots.

Like I’ve argued before, I think I’m pretty good at this. My full-time job is helping Democrats win. I love politics, I work hard, I’m pretty good at figuring people out and the clients I help elect support most of your agenda. Where we differ is that I think Mark Pryor should get some leeway. He’s from a red state after all; he needs to vote the way his constituents want (he does, after all, represent them). I do a little more top-down management than bottom-up, but I fully support both methods. I also see flaws in both methods. And, we agree more often then you would think, e.g. Joe Lieberman should get a swift kick in the junk for undermining the Democratic party.

Bloggers see overall numbers like $1.85 billion and get mad that political professionals get all that money. Hey, I do it, too. Ever see a piece of crap car commercial on TV and think about the money wasted on that advertising firm? Ever say to yourself, “I could do better than that!”?

There’s one problem with that kind of armchair quarterbacking: it’s a selective view. You need to judge the entire body of work a firm produces, what actually went into the production (clients drastically ruin (and improve) work all the time), the amount of material to work with and a whole host of other factors.

The point is this, Chris: we get paid well because that’s what the market has dictated. Nobody gets forced into using a particular pollster, mail firm or TV firm. We have to go pitch clients, cold call people that qualify for the ballot, and we face some pretty fierce competition in the industry every day. Lots of new firms have been opening up because there is a ton of business at the state and local level that was never there before (by the way, that’s where the real money is). And the Internet is making more information available all the time. More information equals more informed decisions.

Do people make money and viability decisions based on which firm you pick? Absolutely. Anyone who’s a consistent giver knows brand name firms. Just like you know Miller Lite but you might not know the Dead Guy.

Experience, name and reputation mean something in this world. That’s why the big firms have big market share and that’s why they make big money. And this notion that we don’t support the same principles and goals is just bullshit. We just don’t listen to everything you and the so-called netroots say (something which I don’t even think really has a good definition yet).

That said, I do agree with you on a major point. I think you deserve a lot more money than you guys are getting for your work:

Matt Stoller, has previously written about examples of full-time progressive movement activists who receive little or no compensation for their work. … local progressive bloggers typically lose money on blogging every year, even as they help transform local media and activist scenes. …

As a handful of progressive bloggers are criticized for picking up the occasional establishment consulting job, the progressive netroots as a whole funnels exponentially more money into the establishment while receiving virtually no help in return when it comes to building our movement. …

I am also pissed off at the Democratic and progressive establishment that is funded with our dollars, but which refuses to fund us in return.

I’ve said before, you deserve better because you provide a service (the part about leaked polling numbers). We politico/consultant types love politics and you provide us with discussion material all the time. Before, we had to wait for Meet the Press to air, or catch our updates from Inside Poltics. We had to subscribe to Roll Call, the Evans-Novak Report or (those of us that worked for rich lobbyists or big NGO’s) National Journal and CQ.

You’re providing most of this stuff for free and we should find a way to support good advertisers that are catering to what we want. I promise you this: when I start my own political consulting firm, I’ll buy a Blogad. And I have a feeling that one day, when you get a pitch from my firm for a race you may be running, you may just think I deserve a buck or two for my services.

*And, to be fair, why you deserve mine.

Let The Eagle Soar: Behind The RedState Acquisition

Published by William Beutler on January 17, 2007 in Blogs vs. MSM, Mergers, Online Fundraising, Publishing, RedState and Relaunches. 6 Comments

Even as many bloggers have moved into the professional media world, fewer independent blogs have been picked up wholesale by a larger media group. Andrew Sullivan moved his blog over to Time in early 2006, and years earlier, Mickey Kaus moved his Kausfiles over to Slate. But both are solo bloggers who had a pre-existing relationship with those publications.

Rarer still is for a group blog to be bought out — but this past month, that’s just what’s happened at RedState. If anything, that deal less resembles those mentioned above than the Washington Post’s acquisition of Slate from Microsoft two years ago.

Eagle & RedState LogosIn mid-December, the conservative community group site announced it had agreed to be purchased by Eagle Publishing, the parent company of Human Events, Regnery Publishing, Evans-Novak Political Report, the Conservative Book Club, among other movement conservative publishing enterprises.

RedState already had undergone several changes since its launch in 2004 as a 527, including a switch from RedState.org to RedState.com in 2005 to create a for-profit entity that could accept advertising. This was followed by a major redesign and relaunch in the middle of last year, whereupon founding director Erick Erickson was hired/stepped up to run the site full-time. Most of the ad revenue went to him, which was just enough to get by on. But it brought RedState to another crossroads: Paying Erickson stretched the site’s resources too thin to develop and expand the site further.

About a year ago the site’s directors — Erickson plus Clayton Wagar, Mike Krempasky and Ben Domenech — started looking ahead once again, this time with an eye toward a merger. They entertained offers from a few different entities — whose names, alas, I was not told — but questions lingered about whether those groups and individuals understood the site.

The first talks with Eagle, in late spring or early summer of 2006, started out no more serious than those with suitors who had come and gone. But that soon changed. Chiefly, Eagle promised to:

  • Respect the brand and not change it fundamentally
  • Invest in the property long-term, with an eye toward financial viability
  • Keep Erickson and hire Wagar as a consultant to make sure of it

As Erickson told me: “They made it clear to us, we see you as your own brand.” And Eagle’s Group Publisher Stephen O’Connor confirmed, they didn’t “want to break something that’s fixed.”

The formal process began in mid-summer, and sometime in the fall an agreement was hammered out for an undisclosed sum. RedStaters themselves earned a share of the proceeds — and not just the site’s directors, either. About 20 contributors overall, including site co-founder and former director Josh Trevino, did as well. (Some were unable to accept the money on account of job-related ethical considerations.) “Nobody’s going to afford a Bentley,” said Domenech. More like “a few car payments.”

·      ·      ·

So what will change? For one thing, Erickson now has a boss in Eagle’s e-business head, Stuart Richens. Upon the initial announcement, the plan was for Human Events online editor Robert Bluey to be a liaison between RedState and Eagle/Human Events — mostly to rope Erickson into their editorial meetings. However, as noted here recently, Bluey will soon depart for Heritage. Now Erickson will work directly with Richens, who like himself and Wagar, is based in Georgia.

Although Krempasky and Domenech retain no official oversight of the company, they will remain with Erickson and Wagar as directors — along with recently-elevated directors Jeff Emanuel and Thomas Crown — but only for making editorial board decisions, not running the business. Erickson wrote in a subsequent announcement, “In the past, we’ve used the terminology ‘Directors’ and we will probably continue to do so.” The titles will remain the same, though it won’t carry the same legal meaning.

When I spoke to principals from Eagle and RedState in mid-December, there were no existing plans for writers from the Human Events site to cross over to the other, but already that’s been the case: Human Events has a regular feature, “Today on RedState” which sends traffic in that direction, while Bluey had a post on RedState just yesterday.

Is there overlap between Human Events and RedState? Both sides believe there is not: While both are obviously online conservative group efforts, they see Human Events as news editorial content whereas RedState is user-generated. Eagle is a publishing house with different labels, and RedState would just be the newest addition.

·      ·      ·

RedState on ScoopRedState on DrupalFor a long time, RedState was thought of as Daily Kos for the right, in terms of being a community politics site, down to using the same content management system. And they too were conscious of this debt, although where dKos is a purely grassroots site, RedState aimed to be more tightly organized. Their mid-summer move from Scoop to Drupal could be seen as one step in that direction. However unintentional, their acquisition by Eagle seems to represent another.

Eagle assures me that RedState members will not start getting regular e-mails (if you’re on their list, they can send a lot) but their interest in RedState is related: RedState has a database of registered users, and they’re always picking up more.

Eagle’s business model is similar to other ideological publications with a limited, but highly self-selected subscriber base. That base of members (with contact information) is valuable, and candidates, campaigns and organizations will pay good money to rent them. Subscribe to the Washington Monthly, wait a few weeks, and in addition to each monthly issue you’ll get the occasional fundraising plea from the William J. Clinton Foundation. Likewise, Eagle rents its lists to such groups on the right, and with more than 20,000 open accounts at RedState, that’s not a bad place to start looking.

Based on their own data, RedState claims their readers skew “a good decade and a half younger” than those at Daily Kos, and certainly younger than those at FreeRepublic. Often ex-military, married with kids, RedState sees a traffic uptick after work hours, perhaps suggesting their readers include a large number who don’t sit in front of a computer all day. While online demographics are notoriously difficult to measure accurately, it seems plausible they have a unique political audience. On the other hand, if they are younger, they might not have quite as much money.

Yet now, Eagle’s resources enable RedState to do move in new directions. More than just a wannabe Daily Kos, by now it’s in a new category: a reciprocal relationship between new media and old. This kind of thing is not entirely new — AOL paid Jason Calacanis some $25 million for Weblogs, Inc., while the New York Times Co foolishly plopped down more than $400 million for About.com — but those have more in common with dot com-era gambles rather than synchronistic strategic acquirements.

Those companies just wanted ad revenue, but Eagle’s acquisition actually strengthens its brand — again, not unlike the Post and Slate. So if at some point in the future (let’s say) the New York Times Co. decides to buy Huffington Post, it will owe less to any success with About.com and more to deals like Eagle-RedState.

P.S. Human Events has found its new editor, replacing both now-at large Terry Jeffrey and Bluey in his online capacity: NRO contributor and Bush 41 dep. Undersec of Defense, Jed Babbin. U.S. News’ Washington Whispers whispers:

One of Babbin’s first tasks: Beef up the paper’s website and capitalize on Internet holdings like RedState.com.

The XYZ of ABC?

Published by William Beutler on January 9, 2007 in Blog Consultants, Campaigns, Facebook, Netroots, Online Fundraising, Republicans, Social Networking and Startups. 13 Comments

Last August conservative bloggers joined with Alexandria-based Campaign Solutions to address the GOP’s weakness in online fundraising. Already they were two years behind the Democratic pioneer in this space, ActBlue. The result was ABC PAC and Rightroots, and when I reviewed it upon launch, I found a lot to be desired:

Rightroots is the only slate [of candidates] available; other interested parties have been told they’ll just have to wait. I’m told that eventually it will be brought up to parity with ActBlue: Bloggers will have a personal ID with the site to track their accounts, and ABC PAC will make it possible to donate to any federal GOP candidate (right now only high profile candidates are listed). … As yet, a proof of concept is really all it is: It’s more like a shareware demo that only lets you play the first level.

Mike Turk, the GOP strategist most responsible for putting the site together, responded in the comments:

ActBlue has been in development for two years, and already raised north of six million dollars. To compare the functionality of a site that has been online for less than two full days, and which publicly states it is trying to put together funds for further development to a site like the one ActBlue is today is a bit disingenuous. … Given full funding, full functionality and a full catalog of candidates, ABC PAC has the potential to meet and exceed what ActBlue has done – and we plan to do so.

It seemed to me that ABC could have debuted with more functionality than it did — it should have built upon what ActBlue had pioneered — but his response was fair. However, I kept checking back throughout the fall, and while the fundraising numbers attained respectability, the ABC website itself never improved. (Disclosure, however, did improve — the front page of ABC now gives an idea of how your money will be handled.)

My main point the first time around was that ActBlue was a Web 2.0 kind of site, like a Facebook for progressive fundraising. You could sign up for your very own account, compile your own slate of candidates, keep track of your progress and follow the rankings. Not only that, but there was plenty of reading material about how ActBlue works. ABC, on the other hand, appeared to be ony a few pages deep, everything was locked down, nothing was customizable, and the only interactive feature would perhaps be watching the figures change.

Flash forward a couple months, and the situation is even more dire for online Republican activists. First, here’s a screen capture from ActBlue’s front page as of last night:

ActBlue front page, 2007 YTD

Now let’s compare that to the front page of ABC PAC, taken at the same time:

ABC PAC front page, 2007 YTD

Note the figures. Yes, it’s all this cycle. The top 5 presidential candidates on ActBlue have received about $434,000, while all candidates on ABC PAC have collected exactly $298.

The stark difference continues as you explore each site. ActBlue’s page for the ‘08 presidential contest provides plenty of options for supporting a candidate, on the site and off, and also-ran apparent runner Dennis Kucinich has raised just $20 shy of ABC’s top recipient. Edwards is the clear fundraising leader, because his own campaign is making use of ActBlue’s infrastructure. If you go to his website and click “Contribute” under the “Take Action Menu,” you will be redirected to to ActBlue.

By contrast, it doesn’t seem anyone has linked to ABC in over a month. Will one of the just-hired GOP blogger consultants persuade one or more of their candidates to use ABC PAC? They can’t, at least not without talking to the Donatellis first. But why would you even bother? The website is boring, an obvious corporate job without even the faintest sign of the social networking tools that make ActBlue so cool.

And what of Rightroots itself, the monopoly blogger slate from the ‘06 cycle? It is no longer linked off the main page, and if you punch in the URL yourself, you’ll find a generic ABC page thanking you for your support:

Because of you, ABCPac was able to raise almost $300,000 for Republican House and Senate candidates, online! … We are currently in the process of expanding and improving our web site and will be announcing our new efforts in the coming months.

Maybe that’s true. But if that assurance was available somewhere besides an orphan page, I’d be inclined to take it more seriously. Besides, ABC doesn’t need to get a little better to be useful. It needs to get a lot better. Currently, there is no baby to throw out with the bath water.

As of now, putting ActBlue and ABC side by side is like comparing the Wii to a Tiger Electronics handheld. ABC isn’t even playing the same game as ActBlue, and it is far from clear that it ever will.

Update: For further discussion and debate on this topic, see (in chronological order going back nearly a week) Patrick Ruffini, Mike Turk, Rob Bluey and Todd Ziegler.

Exit Music For A Campaign

Published by William Beutler on November 7, 2006 in Democrats, Election Night, Meatspace, Midterms '06, National Politics and Online Fundraising. 1 Comment

It is only a matter of minutes now before the polls close and BIog P.I. departs for an evening of electoral victory/defeat partying, letting people with a stake in the day’s events this buy our drinks. In the meantime, here are some thoughts before the election returns are returned…

Today’s Wall Street Journal could have coined it the Wonkette Rule:

Two-by-two, polling specialists from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press will go into rooms in New York and Washington shortly before noon Tuesday. Their cellphones and BlackBerrys will be confiscated; proctors will monitor the doors; and for the next five hours, these experts will pore over exit-poll data from across the country.

If all goes well, only when they emerge from their cloisters will the legions of ravenous political bloggers have any chance of getting their hands on the earliest indication of which party will end up controlling Congress.

The sidebar does, however, single out Nick Denton’s Beltway gossip sheet in a sidebar (though in 2004 Slate’s Jack Shafer joined Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox in bravely/shamefully running those numbers early):

WSJ pins early exit poll blame on Wonkette

That’s right, it’s all the bloggers’ fault — and not the reporters who leaked the information to them, nor the reporters who leaked the information to themselves for publishing on the Internet.

These things we know: Exit polls are far from authoritative, and one shouldn’t jump to conclusions based on them. However, there are ways of making that point without being as deliciously hubristic as RNC Research Department:

In 2000, Exit Polling Malfunctioned And Incorrectly Projecting [sic] Vice President Al Gore As The Winner Of The Crucial Battleground State Of Florida.

Well, Yes, And Then Some Other Stuff Happened, Too.

Also of some interest — what Danny Glover did for political blogger/consultants last week, today he does for political blogger/donors. Earlier in the week I extrapolated from his numbers (in some cases perhaps a bit too far) to create charts based on them. Today, why don’t I rank his latest findings in order, from those donating the most to those donating the least? Why not indeed:


Blogger Breakout Total
John Hinderaker, Power Line Mark Kennedy ($2,400); Michelle Bachmann ($2,100) $4,500
Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos Jim Webb ($1,825); Jon Tester ($1,300); Ciro Rodriguez ($250) $3,375
Hugh Hewitt, TownHall.com Jon Kyl ($2,000); Rick Santorum ($1,000) $3,000
Duncan Black, Atrios Vote Vets ($250); Lois Murphy ($200); Patrick Murphy ($200) $650
Matt Stoller, MyDD Ned Lamont $500
Chris Bowers, MyDD Ned Lamont $250
Stirling Newberry, various Ned Lamont $250

All numbers from Glover’s FEC searches, and as I am guessing he did not run every known political blogger’s name through the system, the list is surely incomplete. But would you have pegged Kos to have donated more than Hewitt? I’m pretty sure I would not.

The next time Blog P.I. is updated, the Washington political world will be turned upside down. Or possibly not. But if I had to wager — and I have made my non-wagering predictions elsewhere —  things are more likely than not to end up sideways.