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Tax Day Special Report: What is Online Fundraising?

BY Alan Rosenblatt | Sunday, April 15 2007

With all the attention being paid to how much money the candidates are raising online, I think we need to better understand what “online fundraising” means.  Does it just include funds that are solicited and fulfilled online, or does it also include any funds submitted through the candidates’ online contribution forms, regardless of how solicited?  Or what if people mail in a check based on an email solicitation?  You see, this is not such a simple question.

Further, while we tend to focus on online campaign strategies in isolation from other campaign strategies, that view is already dated.  The boundaries between online and offline campaign strategies are blurred, at a minimum, and obliterated at most.  One only need look at the spike in Obama’s YouTube views following the extensive coverage CNN and the rest of the media gave to the 1984 video to see that offline developments drive online activity.

So let me suggest a typology for online fundraising:

  1. The solicitation and fulfillment are both online
  2. The solicitation is offline and the fulfillment is online
  3. The solicitation is online and the fulfillment is offline

Online solicitation can take several forms.  They can be delivered to voters via:

  1. email,
  2. online ads,
  3. candidate homepages,
  4. candidate social network profiles,
  5. candidate social network groups,
  6. campaigns posting comments with links to its contribution page on blogs,
  7. recruiting bloggers to make the ask for the campaign,
  8. bloggers calling for contributions to their favorite candidate on their own initiative,
  9. voters being asked by the campaign to ask their friends to contribute to the candidate, and
  10. voters using tools like ActBlue to raise money on their own for their favorite candidate.

Offline solicitations can come from

  1. direct mail
  2. TV ads
  3. radio ads
  4. print ads,
  5. billboards,
  6. candidate speeches,
  7. word of mouth,
  8. et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

What should not count as online fundraising are offline solicitations that lead to campaign staffers entering the contributions into the webform for the contributor.  A key to characterizing online fundraising is that the contributor uses the online form to make the contribution him/herself.  The only exception is when the solicitation is delivered online and the contribution is given offline (often because of a fear of giving credit card info online).  The common element is the direct online connection with the contributor, whether it is on the solicitation or the fulfillment side of the equation.

So as candidates move forward in their reporting of how much money they raise online versus offline, these classifications should be part of the reporting.  Without such detail, we will have no true basis for comparison among and between candidates, and no clear analytical criteria for assessing the success of the campaigns in online fundraising.

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