The Big Number: Half a Billion
By Tom Watson, 11/20/2008 - 10:16pm

The Washington Post is out tonight with the really big numbers on the Obama campaign's success online. Here's the, er, money graf:

In an exclusive interview with The Post, members of the vaunted Triple O, Obama's online operation, broke down the numbers: 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.

To put that in online fundraising context: the million or so registered nonprofit orgsanizations in the U.S. raised between $6 and $8 billion online last year - combined.

And is email still the killer app, even on a social networked Internet? Apparently so:

Obama's e-mail list contains upwards of 13 million addresses. Over the course of the campaign, aides sent more than 7,000 different messages, many of them targeted to specific donation levels (people who gave less than $200, for example, or those who gave more than $1,000). In total, more than 1 billion e-mails landed in inboxes. (Four years ago, Sen. John F. Kerry had 3 million e-addresses on his list; former Vermont governor Howard Dean had 600,000.)



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