Give Me Your Money

Continuing with fundraising readings from my last blog, some of the studies TPCOFP (The Political Consultants’ Online Fundraising Primer) discuss are really interesting. Most importantly, they found studies “showed that the people who are interested in politics and actively participate through the Internet have a considerably higher rate of contributing online—about 24 percent.”

I think it makes sense that those people that are already “plugged in” to current events and all would be encouraged to donate and more likely to donate online because of the added convenience. I do wonder though of those that contributed, how many were first time donors. What I mean is would they have donated elsewhere regardless of the internet, or is there perhaps some persuasive element to the websites they visited that urged them to donate?

There is a donate page for “Race 2004” in which they ask for money to help them buy new polling data. Unfortunately, the site hasn’t changed anything since the election. As we discussed in class, it doesn’t make sense that they haven’t updated the site to include their fundraising goals and timeline… lazy, lazy web designers!