I got an email today from the GOP telling me to download their new toolbar.

Being a good email reader I did what they told me to do, it was quick, easy and voila now I can raise money for the GOP just by doing what I normally do, waste time learn valuable information on the internet.

After a few minutes of random browsing I checked back into my stats and I had raised $1.01!

Not bad, especially if you get a few thousand people using it during the next few months. Not sure how this works with campaign finance reform and wish the GOP site would be a little more clear in that regard.

The one thing I don't like about it is you have to use yahoo to search, I happen to like the other team.

Try it out for yourself. Then post your thoughts back here.

Last night I spoke with a small group of conservative activists at the Leadership Institute about some of the emerging technologies and tips I offer with regard to fundraising online.

Via my SlideShare account, you can see (and download) my presentation:

| View | Upload your own

Of course, a presentation is only as good as its presenter, and since most of the slides in my deck offer little text, I'll elaborate.

I kicked off the discussion by noting that the Internet has done one major thing, "helped us communicate more effectively with real, live people -- 'smarter, better, faster, NOW.'" We no longer have to wait for checks to be written by our supporter and mailed to our campaign -- instead, we're seeing a trend of folks who are giving donations online.

I use the example of Barack Obama as the latest evidence of this shift from offline giving to online giving. I site Barack's online fundraising numbers that have been reported well by Patrick Ruffini.

With regard to how Democrats have been able to amass so much treasure from previously unturned stones, I always use a personal example to help relate what I call the Long Tail of Fundraising.

Now that the stage is set, I talk about the Left's ActBlue and how Slatecard has helped provide a similar utility for the Right. I then talk about some of the tools that I believe will change the online fundraising space forever like Slatecard's proprietary innovation, Donor Analytics, and our deployment of anywhere fundraising widgets and facebook applications (still in private beta) to help drive donations in popular watering holes.

I conclude by offering four quick and easy tips to help better embrace online supporters.

1. Capture Emails at Every Possible Turn. Use a splash page before folks enter your website to make your supporters make a choice -- join your team or don't -- but the choice must be made before entering a website.

2. Ask for Realistic Gifts. Ask your online community for $25, $50 or $100. Your community will give you what they can afford but the folks that will give you low-dollar amounts online will likely give more to you over time. The point is to lower the barrier of entry and build your donor base.

3. DonationTubes. Have your principle/candidate make the final "ask" via video embedded directly to your secure donation page. Read this blog post for a more thorough answer.

4. Thank Your Supporters. It's hard to believe, but some politicians (and I know from personal experience) do not thank their online supporters. As an example of how to properly thank your supporters, I relate the fact that I received a personal note from Senator Tom Coburn when I contributed a mere $20 to his campaign through Slatecard. The benefit of him taking the time to personally recognize my donation is that, well, here I am blogging about it and I told a room of 30 conservative activists about it last night. In other words, treat every donor on an equal playing field and it will likely yield a great ROI.

The bottom-line with regard to online fundraising is that there's no silver bullet. I can't tell you how to mirror what Ron Paul did or what Barack Obama is doing. But we can keep an eye on the space and help relate what works and what doesn't.

[Cross-Posted at the Slatecard Blog.]

Ask any politician what the best way to get a donation from a supporter is and they'll begrudgingly admit that it's when the politician looks that supporter in the eye (or via a phone call) and makes the "ask." Begrudgingly admitted because all politicians hate to fundraise.

So how do we modernize this concept and capitalize on what we know about effectively campaigning? Common sense, my friends. Let's add an "ask" from the candidate right before someone makes a donation.

As a political consultant, one of the services we provide our clients is the deployment of what I've termed DonationTubes. DonationTubes, quite simply are a short, elevator pitch video message from the candidate to their supporters that can be viewed right before someone enters their credit card information.

You can see how we've incorporated a DonationTube for Lt. Governor Peter Kinder's website here:

A few key things to note when thinking about adding a DonationTube:
* Keep the message short and hit on key action items like giving "recurring/monthly donations." You will only receive if you ask.
* You'll note that Kinder's donation page, of course, is secured with an SSL certificate which gives donors the confidence they need to input their credit card information.
* You can not use a third-party flash video provider (like YouTube or Blip.TV) on secure websites which is why we are hosting this video, and only this video, on our servers.
* Just because we can't use YouTube on this page, we still upload the video to our YouTube channel so that supporters can find it and add it to their website.

The donation page is our last opportunity to connect with our most valuable and committed supporters. Use what you have and succeed online by thinking creatively about the nuts and bolts of the process.

From time to time, I receive solicitations to "donate" to support various conservative web sites. Some of these sites asking for a "donation" are for-profit. I have no problem with a for-profit site seeking "subscriptions" or "membership dues" or "tips" or other forms of voluntary gratuity or support, but to me, a donation is something that is made to a non-profit or public entity like a charity, political campaign, or a church. It doesn’t seem fair, or ethical, for a profit-making enterprise to use the word "donation".

Indeed, at worst, asking for donations might be a form of deceptive advertising, particularly when the site goes out of its way to obscure its true organizing structure. The key issue is the reasonable person’s assumptions about the purpose and meaning of the word "donate" and the context of the site’s marketing.

My perspective is that of someone working for a non-profit that is subject to myriad tax, accounting, and disclosure restrictions when we fundraise. The issue undermines political fundraising as well. How much responsibility does the conservative movement have to police its own ranks? Should it be possible to "donate" to a for-profit company?

Republicans need to understand what's happening here:

This is the result of just three emails sent by the Obama campaign. It's more than Mike Huckabee raised last quarter. It's probably more than any Republican raised online last quarter with the exception of Ron Paul.

Think about that. One email. $650,000.

Imagine what their nominee will do to us with the entire weight of the online Democratic Party behind them. I'm thinking $1 to $2 million an email.

Each email is the equivalent two or three fundraising dinners. Each of which probably require hundreds of man hours to produce. That's only for of one email, not the three that have been sent this week. One email that probably took someone an hour or two write, that took a few hours to get approved, that took another hour or two to be formatted and sent. (And "stripped down" email is even more efficient.)

All because they were able to build up a huge list in the hundreds of thousands using proven list-building techniques that, to some degree, can be duplicated by anyone.

At the end of Q2, the campaign claimed 235,000 BarackObama.com members. Given his astronomic traffic the first half of the year, the fact that they incredibly claimed more donors than online supporters, and growth since then, I have to think the mail universe they're sending to is closer to 500,000.

So I'm going to guess their metrics for this campaign look like this:

500,000 emails sent175,000 opened the message40,000 clicked through20% conversion rate8,000 donors @ $80 per donation = $640,000

But as successful as Barack has been online, not all their campaigns have been this successful. Their end of quarter campaign, for instance.

Comparing this blog post with their fundraising graphic, Obama picked up 9,439 contributions in the last three days of the quarter, having sent an email each of those days. Assuming $80 a contribution (the going rate for Democratic online contributions, at least according to John Edwards's ActBlue page), that's just shy of $750,000. Or $250,000 an email.

How did they more than double their fundraising performance per email?

First, the message of this campaign is a lot stronger. It opened up on Tuesday with an email from BO himself called "Hillary's money." They're going negative on Hillary. That's attention grabbing.

Second, the goal is audacious but ultimately realistic. $2.1 million sounds like a lot. Unless you know you can count on at least $500,000 an email and show measurable progress towards the goal through a live counter. In 2004, Joe Trippi talked about the $100 Revolution -- 2 million people giving 100 bucks to match President Bush. That probably struck a lot of folks as pie-in-the-sky. $2.1 million is doable. Set big goals you can realistically achieve with a short but powerful burst of activity.

Third, the message of the end-of-quarter campaign was so weak by comparison. It was basically: we're 34/35ths of the way there -- help put us over the top. That's not inspiring. That tells people they're not needed because they're so close anyway, they're just a statistic and someone else will fill the gap. Even though 10,000 new donors is a lot. They would have been better off resetting the counter to zero.

How much does the stripped down format help? Probably only at the margins. It probably means your message gets read more, but arguably the point is not to get people to read. It's to get people to click. The first time they tried stripped-down email was in the end of quarter campaign and it probably didn't help much. Message matters more.

This is all part of a pattern of experimentation that is vital in every campaign. The Obama team probably saw they weren't getting the results they were used to getting in previous quarter-ending efforts, so they tried something different, using real dollars and starting the counter at zero.

Ron Paul's campaign in the second quarter was everything its supporters so fervently claimed: distributed and supporter-driven. They raised $2.4 million. In the third quarter, they used technique to boost that return dramatically, putting a live fundraising counter on their homepage. That raised $5.1 million. Technique and gathering momentum doubled the return. And now, in the ultimate test of whether radical transparency and audacious goals can transform fundraising, they're looking to leapfrog the frontrunners with a $12 million goal.

The lesson here is get in the game. Always try new stuff. Do bold audacious things to first build your list and then monetize it. Try everything at least once, but don't get distracted by the shiny new Web 2.0 toys. Socnets still can't raise what email can. And realize that the Web is more than just a medium for getting your message across. It's a medium for moving people and money.

Ron Paul's supporters have provided a measure of radical transparency into his fundraising that would make most political operatives suffer heart failure. Going well beyond the now-passe end-of-quarter fundraising "bat," the Paul campaign has set a public goal of $12 million raised for the quarter, posting their current total live on the homepage and including the names and hometowns of donors. If a donation comes in while you're on the site, you'll see it update live.

As if this weren't bold enough, RonPaulGraphs.com has taken it a step further. Using the live data feed that powers the graphic, the site publishes an impressive array of analytics including a minute-by-minute view of donations and projected totals for the month and quarter.

But that's not all.

Today, IPDI released Poli-fluentials: The New Political Kingmakers, which builds on their Political Influentials Online in the 2004 Presidential Campaign report.

RoperASW's Influentials took politics, especially Republicans, by storm. This study examines those Influentials who are highly involved in politics.

Based on an e-mail survey completed by 10,000 people this summer, Poli-fluentials dug into the nuances of online political junkies (chances are if TechRepublican is on your reader, you fall into this category). This wasn't a random survey, so findings are specific to population. However, if you're running a campaign or promoting or work for an advocacy group, you want to attract Poli-fluentials.

The report helps answer the question that plagues all of us here--are Republicans behind on the web? Now we have some evidence that there's work cut out for us. Poli-fluentials are, "more likely to be Democrats than Republicans (46% vs. 30%). Similarly, more Poli-fluentials were liberal or very liberal (45%) than were conservative or very conservative (33%)."

Another interesting finding revealed that social networking worked best for progressive or social conservative issues. People need to have internalized and have a personal stake in the issue for it to be successful. Business or private issues that don't engage people on an emotional level aren't the juicy topics that socnets attract.

These two facts alone, show that Republicans can make the most impact by appealing to our base. It's acknowledged that the right has far bigger offline networks to tap. It's time to get those groups online. We've touched on the need to get pro-life groups more active on the web before, and these numbers just show us where the holes in the rightroots are.

Poli-fluentials also overwhelmingly volunteer:

Our research indicates that volunteers to political campaigns come almost exclusively from the ranks of Poli-fluentials. Our study finds that people who make contributions but who do not actively promote candidates and causes are much less likely to volunteer--only 12% of them did. Similarly, among the people who publically promote candidates and causes, only 10% volunteer. Candidates and causes in search of foot soldiers to perform actual work of campaigns would do well to cultivate Poli-fluentials.

Bottom line: You want these people. Not only do they donate, but they're also eager footsoldiers.

There's a lot more in this study that I'm still weeding through. If you're willing to spend $25 to order it, it's worth the investment.

It looks like I was only a little early in my prediction of a Ron Paul $4 million quarter.

In a quarter when non-Hillary fundraising bottomed out, Ron Paul has shown Republicans that there is a price to be paid for not making the Web a central part of your strategy. Sure, top GOPers read the headlines about Obama's fundraising. But they waved it off as a Democrat phenomenon. Their philosophy: Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus -- and nothing about one side could every apply to the other.

Paul's nearly matching a weakened John McCain and quintupling offline darling Mike Huckabee could either be a much needed wake up call, or the morphine drip that keeps this top-down fear of the Internet going until catastrophe forces change.

The profile in today's Boston Globe on the Left's ActBlue is yet another reason to make sure you're on the list to receive updates from the Right's counter to ActBlue, Slatecard...:

Internet-based PAC driving Democratic push
Small donors fuel big support drive

By Scott Helman, Globe Staff | August 7, 2007

CAMBRIDGE -- The new headquarters of ActBlue, with its tangled cords, leftover Deval Patrick signs, and 20-somethings tapping on white MacBook laptops, is what a political campaign would look like if it shared space with a dot-com start-up.

ActBlue is in fact both -- an Internet-based political action committee that is quietly becoming one of the biggest forces in Democratic politics. Its founders aim for nothing short of revolution, and they are already partway there.

The PAC, operated from a former architecture studio on Arrow Street near Harvard Square, functions as an online clearinghouse for campaign contributions to Democrats of all stripes, allowing anyone in the country to donate any allowable amount to any candidate with the click of a mouse: You send the money to ActBlue (actblue.com), and ActBlue funnels it to the campaigns. This gives local, state, and national Democratic candidates a cheap, efficient means of building a base of supporters over the Internet.

This simple but transformative concept has raised $25.5 million and counting since its creation in Cambridge in 2004, when two computer-savvy scientists with liberal leanings set out to take political action in a new direction. They believed that armies of small donors, mobilized effectively, could be more potent than the "bun dlers" who have dominated fund-raising by amassing checks from wealthy contributors. (Read full story.)

The New York Times explores the emergence of the new pro-online engagement wing of the Republican Party in the wake of the near-collapse of first Internet-driven GOP debate. I'm quoted in it.

If we succeed in doing anything, I hope it's to permanently change the incentives for our candidates to engage online. Republican political types tend to harbor the belief that the Web is somehow riskier than other forms of media. That's only true if you disrespect it. Engaging the medium immunizes you. Why? Because it's a lot harder to take down a large and active community than it is a fledgling, tightly controlled one. Big communities know how to defend themselves (that's what this week was and is). Our nominee will be better off with the coat of armor that is a huge self-organizing online community that gives money and repels attacks.

In the last week, we've shown that there is a big online constituency that's just waiting to hear from the GOP candidates if they're just willing to sit down and talk to it. We've shown that online influentials care about the level of online activity from our candidates, and can effectively lobby for more. We've shown that the incentives are all on the side of a forward-leaning approach to the medium.