I have a 35.00 monthly donation with the Obama Campaign. When i get extra money by cutting cost i donate more. I also make sure i buy the campaigns logo bumper stickers and buttons and give them out. It has helped to bring other small donors on base. Myself i don't own a car and get free food for house sitting and i do get a small VA pension so my donation fundraiser is almost half of what is allowed for the primary. I have also given some of my sons college money ( I have been saving) in hopes they will have a fairer system when Barack gets elected. I also don't use much energy so the people i help also support Barack with the savings i have saved them. I don't mind eating simple foods as i think about my two kids in africa i also support and it keeps me humble. I haven't bought things i wanted since feb 11th but then again i have been living on as little as 30.00 a month for a few yrs because i know i need to show by example that we americans waste too much as it is. Well i am sure there are many others out there who just haven't seen your blog or can't even afford to get online but they give.

I sure was part of it last time. Like your friend, I'd never donated to a candidate before. But I was really impressed with the Dean for America website and sent in my first donation ever online in 2003. Eventually I think I gave around $450.00 plus all the time and money I spent on the campaign--for example, paying my own way to Iowa for a week.

As Dean, Obama, and others have shown, this can add up to serious money. I just got back from a fundraiser in San Francisco where we raised over $1 million for the DCCC with a women's luncheon honoring Nancy Pelosi. We had hundreds of women (and a few men) who all gave a fairly small amount as political donations go. Ages ranged from 14 to 90 on our bus. But there were a lot of pretty powerful-feeling women in that room today!

The idea of raising money via small monthly contributions from a large pool of donors has been around for decades. It started with solicitations via direct mail, then phone solicitations, and this decade has moved to the online sphere. Even if it's not on an automated basis, the Dean and Kerry campaigns learned very quickly that frequently sending mass emails asking for small donations of $25 or $50 was easy money.

Just because Chris Anderson wrote a book called "The Long Tail" doesn't mean that it's this blogworthy new concept...

It is true that small donor serial donors are nothing new, but I am guessing there are a lot more of them now. And many of them are first time donors this cycle.

Alan Rosenblatt
AKA DrDigiPol (drdigipol.com)

There's nothing ground breaking in this at all. The only difference between now and the days of calls and direct mail is the barrier to entry is so much less now allowing for more people to participate and most importantly also decreasing the expense to the operation.

I'd like to see a study of dollar spent versus dollar earned over the years. My guess is there may have been the beginning of a dramatic drop in 2000 to operational costs to raise money. Less being spent with more being earned with the increase of online fundraising.

Brett Schenker

5B Consulting
http://www.5bconsulting.com