Why Haven't Conservatives Built Their Own ActBlue Around Twitter?

Like any worthwhile idea these days, this one started its life as a tweet:

This week, a new site called Twollars hit the scene, a Twitter-based fundraising solution for charities. Upon reading about it, I once again thought about using Twitter as an engine for small dollar donations to political campaigns. Similar services like Tipjoy and Twitpay have sprung up, focused around the idea that Twitter is a natural fit for micropayments.

One of the great things about Twitter, and its API, is that it promotes the rapid development of innovative applications on top of it. For example, Twitpay was created over the course of a weekend. At a recent Ruby on Rails conference, a full-blown Twitter-based application was live-coded over the course of one freakin’ hour.

So Twitter isn’t just a great tool, it’s a great platform to build on. Now, we all know for a fact that conservatives dominate Twitter (and that the Left should be nervous). But so far, all the Right has built on top of Twitter is a lame leaderboard. And attempts to mirror ActBlue have not been successful.

Because I just can’t stand to see a good idea go unimplemented, I’d like to share with you a step-by-step description of how a Twitter political fundraising engine could be built, and how much it would cost. Let’s call it Conservatwiv. SPOILER ALERT: It would be really easy, and relatively inexpensive.

Specs

The first thing to do when building an application is to come up with a list of specifications, or specs. I prefer writing out user stories and mocking up wireframes, but for the sake of brevity, a few bullet points will do:

• Users are split into two camps: Activists and Committees. All users must have a Twitter account and will sign in using Twitter’s OAuth mechanism into Conservatwiv.
• Activists must register their address, employer, occupation, and certify that they meet the FEC requirements for contributing to federal committees.
• Committees (campaigns and PACs) must register their FEC ID, and specify their mailing address for receiving weekly checks from Conservatwiv.
• Activists keep a pool of funds at Conservatwiv, making payments via PayPal, Google Checkout, or Amazon Payments.
• When an activist would like to make a contribution, she tweets a message with the letter “c” (for “contribute”) followed by a dollar amount, like the image below.
• Conservatwiv monitors all registered Twitter accounts, and processes any Tweets that are contributions. Every Friday, contributions for the week are tallied for each committee, and a check is mailed out from Conservatwiv (which would need to register as a federal PAC, like ActBlue).

A true spec document would take hours to produce, and should be done by an experienced web development team that charges no less than $150 per hour. If they’re really good, they will have already built some Twitter apps. Surprised by that hourly rate? You shouldn’t be. If you’re paying significantly less than $150/hr for your custom development needs, you’re doing it wrong.

Time for Specs, User Stories, and Wireframes: 15 hours. Cost: $2,250.

The Backend: Accounts and Payments

Thanks to Twitter’s OAuth API, user accounts can be completely handled through Twitter. This means no password ever has to be stored at Conservatwiv. After we have basic user accounts, the Activist and Committee types can be built out, and the appropriate forms and validations created.

Time for OAuth integration and User accounts: 12 hours. Cost: $1,800.

Then, we need to think about how we get money from the Activists and to the Committees. We should use an existing payment service instead of attempting to charge credit cards ourselves. PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon Payments all do this well, and hooking into them is easy.

Time for third-party payment service integration: 12 hours. Cost: $1,800.

Lastly for the backend, we need to create the weekly reporting mechanism that tallies the amounts and tells us how much money to write on each check at the end of the week. Time: 5 hours. Cost: $750.

The Frontend: Tweet Parser

Because Conservatwiv’s main user interface is simply a properly formatted tweet, this part is incredibly easy. Simply watch the all the user tweets coming in and create contribution records as needed.

Time for Tweet Parser: 5 hours. Cost: $750.

Design

Design isn’t my specialty, so I won’t be sharing much in the way of concrete examples. I did spend about 10 minutes whipping up a sufficiently friendly logo:

Credit to Chris Wallace for the bird icon.

A designer should also cost $150/hr, and should deliver full mocks of the home page, setup screens for the Activist and Committee user types, and the payment administration interface. Bonus points go to a designer who can package up clean HTML+CSS for the site. Total design time: 15 hours. Cost: $2,250

An App to Compete with ActBlue for under $10,000!

There you have it. With a competent development shop, this can be built right now for under $10,000 within two weeks. Will the tech-savvy Right finally make the investments they need to truly innovate? Or have they drowned underneath the constant stream of #TCOT, suffocated by the weight of a million teabags? If Twitter truly is a revolutionary tool for the Right, a $10K investment today should yield a massive return on investment in the 2010 cycle.

Disclaimer: I am not an attorney, nor do I specialize in FEC law. Do not start a fundraising operation without legal counsel!