How big are the right-roots? And how do they stack up against the net-roots? I've been asking that question of various people lately, and also looking at some of the metrics available, as both sides of the American political spectrum continue to grow and flex their online muscles in this turbulent season. Here's some relevant data regarding their respective online donor bases.

Credit: IdealWare

The non-profit IdealWare surveyed more than 400 staffers at various non-profits back in November to find out what social media tools they're using, and whether they're finding those applications are meeting their organizational needs on three fronts: reaching new allies, fundraising, and deepening their relationships with existing supporters:

Respondents considered Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and video- and photo-sharing sites reasonably effective -- at least at outreach and enhancing existing relationships. MySpace was not as well-thought-of, and ranked lowest for each of the three goals. LinkedIn was considered comparatively effective for fundraising, but lagged behind everything but MySpace for the other goals.

How the reports speaks to your organizational objectives depends on what those objectives are, so check out the full 20-page study here. But spoiler alert: non-profiters seem to find Twitter the Swiss Army knife of social media tools.

Credit:FixCongressFirst.org

Larry Lessig, ever creative, is trying out what does seem to be a new one as far as the field of email techniques goes. Lessig is giving people on his Fix Congress First email list a chance to opt out -- forever and ever -- from fundraising emails sent from his organization (one dedicated, perhaps a tad ironically, to small-dollar election funding). You can still stay opted in for Fix Congress First's requests for help that don't have anything to do with money, or for informational emails.

Lessig's "Do Not Ask" email is after the jump...

Credit: Pavlov Museum

While, at this moment in early 2010, a vast majority of Americans believe that the American system of government is broken -- 86%, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll that came out yesterday -- only one in 20 Americans believe that the damage to institutional democracy in the United States is irreparable and the democratic experiment hopeless. Where does that hopefulness find its footing? Of course, the great promise of online politics was, is, that by tapping into the distributed world that the web has helped to cultivate, the channels might open up between the electorate and the elected, and great waves of participatory democracy might gush forth. Maybe the very nature of representative government isn't altered as a result, the thinking behind distributed democracy goes. But in this new world order, Congress and others in office would be forced into a relationship of greater accountability. Good, responsive members of Congress would flourish in a system of incentives that wasn't so dominated by the wealth-funded interests of a few or the hollow arguments of those with the establishment standing to get their voices heard.

Over on their pleasingly rejuvenated in-house blog, ActBlue (or at least, the disembodied blog voice of some ActBlue staffer) is arguing that being transparent about your online fundraising is, to steal a phrase from EMILY'S List, like yeast: it makes the dough rise. The more political reporters can see money piling up through online donation services like, say, ActBlue, the more they'll report on the momentum of the fundraising drive, which only serves to amp up that momentum. That's the key to the baseball bats, thermometers, and other tracking tactics you see in online fundraising drives these days. Florida's Marco Rubio, for example, is reporting to have raised $860,000 in his 10-day "Stimulus Hug" money bomb, but without some sort of tracking mechanism, it's more likely that political reporters will wait until FEC numbers come out to report on how candidates across the country are raising cash.

Or they won't report on it at all.

At least, that's the complaint of Florida Democrat Alan Grayson. Grayson trots out a verse from Simon & Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" to take a jab at the political press for ignoring his fundraising prowess over the course of 2009. Blogging on Firedoglake, Grayson sets up a punch line of "I know who he is. Because he’s me" by describing, in the third person a candidate who raised more than $860,000 in the last quarter but was ignored because his story didn't fit into the prevailing political narrative that the Democratic party is in shambles, scurrying around like scared bunnies, afraid of both populist mobs and Wall Street. That ignore candidate "is not a teabagger," blogs Grayson. "He is not boosted relentlessly by Fox News. He’s not even a Republican. He doesn’t think that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, that President Obama was born in Kenya, or that global warming is a hoax." Making the case that fundraising data is readily available on FEC.gov, Grayson wants some props from having hauled in such cash.

It might not have worked to get Grayson the mainstream recognition he craves, but at least some chunk of Grayson's fundraising did happen out in the open, online, in real time. ActBlue reports that Grayson was its second best fundraiser in the last quarter of 2009, raising more than $390,000 from 11,000 donors, putting him just behind the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a relative new kid on the block that pulled in $407,000 from 15,000 donors.

There's a good chance that Grayson will be an even bigger ActBlue hit in the next few months. The Orlando Democrat just came in second in Firedoglake's "Fire Dogs" contest -- a competition whose prize includes being added to FDL's own ActBlue page -- edging out New Yorker Anthony Weiner but falling behind Ohio's Dennis Kucinich, who campaigned via e-mail for the top slot.

You know what they say these days: it's not enough to just hold a money bomb. You gotta have a theme. Scott Brown used "Red Invades Blue." Florida Republican Marco Rubio, running against Gov. Charlie Crist in their party's primary for the open Senate seat, is getting a bit more creative -- and timely -- with it.

Rubio has given over his website to a "Stimulus Bomb" pop-up splash page, pointing to StimulusBomb.com, on the occasion of the approaching anniversary of the time in 2009 when Barack Obama came down to Florida and he and Crist shared a hug in Tampa -- symbolic, in some quarters, for Crist's unacceptable backing of the President's stimulus plan. Photos of the hug made their way around the web, a la Joe Lieberman's "kiss" with George Bush. Rubio is asking for donations that "in amounts that correspond to the $787 billion of our children's money that they wasted on this plan," or in other words, $7.87, $78.70, or $787 -- or $2,400, should you choose to max out now on the primary. The one-year anniversary of Obama's visit to Florida is a week from today, February 10th.

Calling it the "Obama-Crist Stimulus Anniversary," Republican Senator Jim DeMint's Senate Conservatives PAC is running a simultaneous money bomb for Rubio on RubioMoneyBomb.com. DeMint's team is reporting having raised $113,000 thus far.

Rubio's coverage all its bases in its marketing copy for the money bomb. If the stimulus doesn't get you, the hug will. "One year ago," reads Rubio's site, "Charlie Crist and Barack Obama embraced the failed $787 billion 'stimulus' plan." Emphasis added. But not really necessary.

(Graph by Patrick Ruffini/Engage)

Just how major was Scott Brown's transformation of enthusiasm in dollars in the Massachusetts special election? Pretty darn major, writes Patrick Ruffini, whose team handled the logistics for Brown's online fundraising, in a his new detailed post-mortem on the Brown campaign's "fundraising machine."

Behind Brown's unexpected success, fundraising and otherwise, are a great many factors that broke in his favor. The Republican state senator from Massachusetts entered into the stream of public opinion just as it was rising up against Democrats and Barack Obama. The fact that his was a special election, triggered only by the death of Ted Kennedy, meant that Brown didn't have to share the political stage with, really, anyone else. Then there's the fact, Ruffini says, of the impression created in the local press early on (rightly or wrongly, it seems) that the national GOP was largely staying out of the race in Massachusetts. The dollars rolled in.

The task fell then to "grassroots" conservatives, and they picked it up. Brown become a favorite of conservative bloggers, activists, and cable news pundits in the during a winter holiday season traditionally empty of any real political news. The dollars rolled in. (Many of the people who chipped in some cash online, writes Ruffini, name dropped either Fox News, Sean Hannity, or Michelle Malkin, for example.) Ruffini points to a Hail Mary visit by Barack Obama right at the tail end of the campaign. The dollars rolled in; nearly a million, says Ruffini.

How many dollars, in the end, are we talking?

To give you a sense of how crazy things were in the middle of all this, ten days out, when the campaign had raised just over $2 million online, I decided to plug the daily numbers into a spreadsheet, and comparing them to another major effort that went viral on the eve of an election, came up with a projection that we would raise an extra $1.5 million online for the campaign.

Little did I know then that the real figure would be an extra $10 million.

To give some perspective, this was likely the biggest nonpresidential political online fundraising event ever. The most I had ever heard of a statewide candidate raising online before this was Jim Webb’s $4 million in 2006 post-Macaca.

For another peek inside online fundraising numbers, have a look at Democratic clearinghouse ActBlue look back at 2009, a year in which they cleared $30 million for candidates on the left.

Friday night's Hope for Haiti concert and telethon was, in many ways, a smashing success. The show, broadcast simultaneously on dozens of television stations featured dozens of very big name stars. It managed to pull in a remarkable $57 million in individual donations, which compares rather favorably with the $100 million that the Obama administration pledged as the first-round contribution from the U.S. government. In almost every way, Friday's special was a masterful demonstration of planning and coordination. Bringing together all those celebrities on all those networks in such a short time takes tremendous planning skills.

But there was one part of the operation that didn't go all that well. The website that the fundraisers were directing people to, HopeForHaitiNow.org, seemed to buckle under the interest and donations flowing into it. The possibility raised, of course, is that that website downtime means that the total raised to assist people struggling to deal with the aftermath of the disaster in Haiti could have been much higher, that the level of succor provided could have been far greater. It's a fairly stark reminder that that good intentions can go wasted without a well thought-out web strategy to capture them. In other words, online matters. Infrastructure matters. Democratic online strategist Tracy Russo powerfully argues that what happened Friday night should serve as a wake-up call:

I hate to offer such harsh criticism to those who worked so hard to make this event a reality, but it needs to be said. It needs to be made clear that you can’t make your website an afterthought - especially not when you are directing hundreds of millions of viewers to that site to make emotional impulse donations.

Beyond the obvious functional failure - that the website should have been prepared to withstand the massive demand of so many simultaneous visits and donations attempts at once - the site failed the form test too. But that’s another matter all together. I’ll take an unfortunately designed site that works over one that’s just pretty any day.

For some of us, tonight’s beautiful program became a stark reminder of how much work we have to do to transform the culture inside our organizations and to make those with the power understand that a proper, functional website is a core business need.

How can we make that message clear so this never happens again? How do we get a seat at the table so money isn’t left on it? Because tonight, the difference is as plain as life or death for so many suffering so much.

Florida's colorful Democratic Representative Alan Grayson isn't finding to laugh at in a spoof of his CongressmanWithGuts.com website. Grayson has sent a complaint to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking that the creator of the MyCongressmanIsNuts.com website and PAC be fined and sent to the slammer for a five year sentence. Grayson's objection is that the organization's originator doesn't live in the 8th congressional district that he represents, and is thus fundraising disingenuously by referring to Grayson as "my congressman."

Grayson also draws Holder's attention to the fact that while the PAC's FEC's filings pledge to that it "supports or opposes more than one Federal candidate," there's little ambiguity that Grayson is the one in the crosshairs here. If the name of the PAC alone wasn't proof of that, there's the fact that MyCongressmanIsNuts.com is nearly an exact replica of Grayson's own PAC website, right down to the prominent YouTube placement and electric blue grunge font.

You can read Grayson's four-page complaint yourself right here.

(Updated to include DFA's actual remarks. They somehow got lost in editing. Sorry for the bother.)

Yesterday we covered how the progressive blogosphere was afire with activity around Florida Democrat Alan Grayson's "money bomb," which has thus far raised, according to a campaign tally, more than $505,000 through the efforts of several progressive blogs (Open Left, Daily Kos, Crooks & Liars, Digby) and the hitting of email lists of high-profile progressive groups, including MoveOn, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and Democracy for America. Discussing the tactic with some smart folks, a question came up. Why launch an all-out online fundraising offensive on behalf of a candidate whose own election isn't for another year (and who happens to be personally wealthy) one day before voters go to the polls in hotly contested elections in New Jersey and Virginia and major gay-related ballot measure votes in Maine and Washington State? Is it an unnecessary distraction, or can the netroots handle doing two or three or four things at once?

It's a worthwhile, if provocative, question that becomes even more interesting when you consider it in the context of an online left made up of blogs big and small as well as network-based organizations whose mailing lists constitute their major -- if not only -- point of political leverage. Here's what Democracy for America's political director Charles Chamberlain had to say...