Obama’s $28M Online
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 4th, 2008 4:44 pmThe news last week that Obama raised $32 million in January — $28 million of it online — is historic.
Why? Because we’re getting our first glimpse at the death of offline fundraising. Just 12% of Obama’s money came in offline. When we were in the primary season zone, the only way people knew how to give was online.
In the world of direct mail, with its incremental returns, it would have been impossible to generate this kind of an explosive return. (And Obama’s camp didn’t even try.) A good month in the mail is when returns go up 30%. A good month online is when they go up 300%. As Karl Rove wrote in his must-read last week:
The Internet dramatically shortens the gap between political success and raising money. Under the old regime, members of the finance committee would start calling a few days after a successful debate and FedEx’ing the checks. Mail pieces might hit 10 days later. Fundraising required events with weeks of advance notice. Today, if you do well in a debate on Tuesday night you can begin raising large sums of money Wednesday morning. Effective fundraising can be a mouse-click away.
By any objective measure, online now has to be seen as (potentially) the most powerful form of fundraising, period. No Ranger/Pioneer network can produce $32 million in a month — at least not month after month. The mail can’t do it. Phones are dying.
The key ingredient in Obama’s phenomenal fundraising success is not any tactic. It is Obama himself. He’s seen as inspiring — and electric. He’s created something people want to be a part of.
And yet, campaign tactics helped. Very early on, the body language of the campaign told people that if they wanted to help, the Web was the place to do it. They announced online. They sold tickets to events online. At those 10,000 person rallies, they were busy collecting e-mail addresses. They built out a professional new media team early on, with ten staff. All of these subtle things combined made a difference. How much of one, we can’t know. But probably in eight figures.
As Republicans, we need to be realistic about our ability to dial up this kind of money, or something even close to it, in 2008. I’m sure Hillary Clinton also raised a substantial sum in January, but is too scratching her head at Obama’s blowout performance. This has much more to do with personality and media coverage as it does with sound fundraising tactics.
But let’s look four or eight years down the road. Let’s assume that Republicans get a young, dynamic figure to run on a platform of revitalizing the party. There are one or two of them now in Governor’s Mansions, so it’s not entirely out of the question.
When and if that happens, the tactics will need to match the candidate. That means a new generation of campaign management that focuses as much, or even more, on chasing a potentially unlimited number of $25 mouseclicks over a finite number of $2,300 checks. That means prioritizing online community building over using the Web to score short-term, one-day media hits. It means reorienting the candidate’s message towards online success, with candidate talking less about “me,” and more about “you” — the ordinary citizen engaging online.
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Tagged: barack obama 
fundraising online politics
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