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:
Now let’s compare that to the front page of ABC PAC, taken at the same time:
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.
Hi,
You make some fair points on design, but the $428K raised by Edwards is also coming from his site so in essence they are double counting. ActBlue is powering his donations (see badge at bottom of their contribution page) so it makes it look a lot worse than it is. I’m sure if Rudy was using ABC to power his donations and ABC reported those numbers, you’d have a better donation comparison.
Thanks for the comment, Anonymous!
However, you had read the post more carefully, you would know that I addressed the Edwards campaign’s involvement. You are correct on one thing: if Edwards was not going through ActBlue, the numbers would be much lower. But even if he did not, netroots fundraising would still overwhelm rightroots fundraising.
And more to the point, ActBlue is obviously useful to Democratic politicians. Meanwhile, ABC PAC — by dint of those “points on design” — has made itself irrelevant to Republicans.
Hello:
Part of the success of Democrats/progressives in online fund-raising and, just generally, in doing a better job of controlling the political dialogue on-line, may be attributable to the fact that conservatives still run talk radio, not to mention their own television network in FNC, and therefore have less need for a meaningful net roots presence. So sure, the GOP’s efforts could have been better, but I suspect they don’t have their A team spending much time thinking about the blogosphere right now, although there are signs that may be changing.
There is a tendancy by marketing people to overweight the flash of their campaign materials and discount more nuts-and-bolts issues like product spec and sales channel.
Neat web sites are easy, the other stuff is hard.
The deficiency of rightroots is that it simply didn’t have the same on-line “sales channel” to exploit that netroots does, and in my opinion, doesn’t have the same motivations to act nation-wide that the left has.
Netroots is a name that misleads–its the flower, not the root of a dynamic that has worked persistently to create a vast on-line activist community committed to returning–not just a candidate, but an entire party to power. Yet the real reason for its existence is to empower the new lefty internet mullahs.
In the end, netroots had little or no effect on the election. Republicans had a significant financial advantage in the last election cycle, but couldn’t overcome the 6 year repudiation. Most famously, netroots supported Ned Lamont to no avail.
This isn’t to say that neither netroots or rightroots aren’t important to do–money is money, but rightroots lagging has less to do with site design than systemic differences in the Republican fund-raising apparatus.
Anonymous,
Re: “the left’s superior netroots presence.”
It’s funny I keep hearing this, because Daily Kos isn’t even the largest community political site in terms of raw traffic. That would be Free Republic. Townhall is no slouch either, and they regularly best Kos in terms of monthly uniques in virtually any venue (Nielsen, Alexa, Compete, etc.)
http://snapshot.compete.com/freerepublic.com dailykos.com townhall.com
Why do the conservative community/opinion sites get less attention? Because they aren’t new. Free Republic has been around since the late ’90s, and the opposition to President Clinton that fueled their growth is quite analogous to the hostility to President Bush that fueled the left-blogosphere. Townhall has also been around for more than a decade, and though the majority of their site is columns/opinions more than blogging, they are larger in absolute terms.
Fox News, conservative talk radio, and conservative websites are more popular because there are more ideological conservatives than ideological liberals in the population (this was true even in ‘06 — check the exit polls). It’s true that all of some of these larger venues have focused on opinion more than activism/fundraising, but it’s not clear to me that isn’t a wiser move strategically. Having a better new media infrastructure trumps an extra $3 or $4 million to Dem candidates. And efforts are underway to monetize and activate the larger conservative Web audience for conservative candidates.
To tell the truth the conservative websites are still more popular because there are more ideological conservatives than ideological liberals in the population. But ABC isn’t even playing the same game as ActBlue. And it is the only response.