Dear candidates and campaign managers:

Why is it, after grassroots donors gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Dem presidential candidates in the 2004 cycle, that you are now completely ignoring them in this cycle? I'm not saying you shouldn't be courting large donors. But instead of spending ALL your time between high-dollar fundraisers and donor "call time," why not just spend at least 15 or 20 minutes per day doing things to win the hearts of the mass base of Democratic donors and activists?

The Web on the Candidates

Is Al Gore running? Leonardo DiCaprio couldn't get it out of it him, but after he won an Oscar for best documentary last night people are talking. Patrick Ruffini noticed that Gore's web site has a new splash page asking visitors to send their names and email addresses to Congress; Ruffini wonders if it's a sign of bigger ambitions. "A good e-mail list is something any candidate needs to hit the ground running. And if you’re smart, you capitalize on high-impact events like the Oscar win to collect e-mail addresses."

In a profile of Students for Barack Obama leaders, the Merced Sun-Star looks for ways that campaigns can use social networking sites like Facebook to get people elected. Meredith Segal, executive director of the group, knows it's about more than online organizing. "We recognize that we have tens of thousands of members online. But unless we get those people out knocking on doors, participating in phone banks, registering voters and obviously ultimately voting, (our) online organizing will be little more than a powerful way to demonstrate support for (Obama)."

Much has been said about the inaccuracies of blogs, Wikipedia, and other forms of collaborative intelligence. But traditional centralized institutions also have shortcomings. Earlier this week, for example, many traditional corporate media outlets suggested that Hillary Clinton was the fundraising leader without having complete information. And mainstream media has been more than twice as likely to cover the Iowa and New Hampshire contests as to cover the South Carolina and Nevada contests.

The Web on the Candidates -- Daily Digest Lite

Over PrezVid Jeff Jarvis takes a look at what presidential candidates are advertising using Google AdSense, and whose keywords they're advertising with. The most active advertisers are Hillary Clinton -- who's advertising on Obama, Biden, and Dodd searches, and Rudy Giuliani -- who's advertising on McCain, Brownback, Tancredo and the phrase "flat tax." This basically means that when you do a search for, say, McCain or Tancredo, you may see an ad for Giuliani on the right side of the page. Take a closer look at the post for many more interesting results, including the fact that "no one — no candidate, no brand, no news organization, no one — is advertising against “Bush” and “George W. Bush”, even negatively. Nobody wants any of that on them."

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

Cross-posted to Tech President

In the last 72 hours, I've taken a fair amount of heat via e-mail about my TP post on Romney's fundraising. With Alan's post arguing that anything solicited or fulfilled online should be counted as online; and Roger Craver's discussion of balanced fundraising, I've been rethinking the operational definition of "online fundraising". While there has definitely been a specific connotation for that term - essentially equating it to "grassroots" fundraising, it appears that many now feel the definition is out-dated.

If that's the consensus view, I'm not one to stand in the way of progress. If the Internet has become ubiquitous and we no longer need to distinguish between the small dollar donor and the major donor online, so be it. My bigger complaint was always been with the distinction between the low-dollar and high-dollar donors. Where a campaign gets its funds, and who it is ultimately beholden to, should be of concern to everyone. As a result, if we are to stop categorizing donors as online or off, we must draw that distinction elsewhere.

Obama got Chad Hurley and Ted Leonsis's checks. Clinton got Terry Semel's. Edwards got Michael Eisner's. And uber-venture-capitalist Vinod Kholsa invested in three presidential candidates: Obama, Edwards and McCain. A quick and dirty look at which way the digerati are leaning...

With the announcement of a new "viral" campaign donations tool, MySpace reserves the right to track the funds raised by presidential candidates using the gadget. Big deal or no big thing?

Toward the end of last week, the John Edwards campaign pulled off a bit of a technological coup — they got around the inherent limits of raising money via cell phone text message. But here's the rub: the tools they used may not work as well again for Edwards, or for anyone else for that matter.

Here's what happened. As Justin Oberman ably described on Friday:

Hi, I'd like to ask all of our Republican colleagues to go to the bathroom or go watch tv or something.

Um, yeah, just kidding, but here's why: I'm going to be talking about a damned interesting application that electoral and advocacy campaigns can use to keep their branding and messaging in front of supporters, and I'd rather that my Democratic friends get on top of it first. I've been impressed with the potential of widgets as an outreach and communications tool for months now, and a product has come along that looks to fill just about every role I've talked about an ideal campaign widget doing.