Ron Paul has "made history," raising more than $2.7 million in the past 16 hours from 21K supporters.
Via their press release:
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA—Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul beat all online primary fundraising records at 4:00pm today. In 16 hours, the Ron Paul campaign brought in over $2.7 million in online contributions, making it the largest single-day online primary fundraising effort by a presidential candidate in United States election history. Approximately 21,000 Americans made online donations thus far. Today’s efforts surpassed John Kerry’s record $2.7 million online fundraising efforts two days after the 2004 Super Tuesday primaries, and Republican John McCain’s $1 million online following the New Hampshire primaries in 2000.
As of this post (5:13 PM), Paul has raised $5,668,663.00 toward his goal of $12M for the fourth-quarter.
Agree with me or not, this is the Revolution I've been talking about. This will be the campaign that "proves" the importance of an effective Internet strategy to the naysayers and changes the game.
UPDATE 5:30 PM: Jose Antonio Vargas of the WaPo has more. And make sure you check out this guest post at TechPresident from a Paul supporter.
UPDATE 10:35 PM: A note just sent out by Ron Paul's campaign:
Is it possible to comprehend what we've done today? Earth-shattering, jaw-dropping... No matter which way you phrase it, Ron Paul is for real.
Over $3,800,000 raised.
More than 35,000 total donations.
1 message - and 1 candidate - unlike any other.
Can we keep our momentum going? The most successful fundraising day ever is John Kerry's $5.7 million. And that was on the day he accepted the Democratic nomination.
Let's do it: https://www.ronpaul2008.com/donate
Jonathan Bydlak
Fundraising Director
Ron Paul 2008
This is incredible. I wonder if other candidates -- Republican and Democratic -- are envious? Perhaps this will be the day that changed online politics forever? Time will tell. I'm optimistic.
UPDATE Nov. 6, 9:04 AM: Final results are in: Over a 24 hour period, Ron Paul raised $4.3 million online.
Comments
Reason for the success
It's fine to observe the accomplishment, but it would be more insightful if you gave some thoughts of how you think Paul supporters did it. Do you think it was the candidate, the message? What? From what some Paul commenters told me the organization for this "money bomb" was outside the campaign. If so, it would be hard for other campaigns to replicate.
Too early to tell...
The first note I received this morning from the Paul campaign made it sound entirely like an independent venture by Paul's community of supporters: "Dr. Paul’s independent supporters have set in motion a fundraising drive for Monday, November 5th."
So it appears that what may have started as an independent, community effort was fully embraced by the official campaign to help push the numbers even further?
Possible to replicate? Unclear. There are definitely some lessons to be learned about how a distributed force coordinated their effort as they have done. I imagine we'll know more facts over the next few days.
Lessons
The only lesson I can gleen so far for a campaign is not to stop such independent efforts. What I haven't seen is any information on what the Paul campaign did to facilitate it or amplify the community effects. All the campaigns are using similar internet tools. So the difference must be in execution.
Post new comment