I received a couple of noteworthy e-mail solicitations from nonprofits today.  The first was from SaveOurEnvironment.org, the second from MoveOn.

For those who don’t know, the core finding of my dissertation is that the targeted online fundraising that MoveOn engages in is fundamentally different from the Prospect Direct Mail model that has ruled small-dollar fundraising since the 1970s, and that this shift is leading to a “second interest group realigment.”  More dollars are flowing into the political advocacy sector than ever before, but those dollars are going to different organizations (large scale internet-mediated generalists) and tend to be targeted toward specific projects, meaning that they are a little less useful for covering infrastructure and unsexy program costs (you can build some of those costs into the overhead of any target project, but there are limits.  Legally, it’s all pretty cloudy right now, since this fundraising regime is so new.  As it gets clear, things are going to get very interesting for the nonprofit world).  Anyway, what makes the “MoveOn model” special is a couple of things:

1. They’re using e-mail instead of mail.  Therefore, there’s no increasing marginal cost of sending out twice as many mail pieces.  No printing, no postage, etc.  There’s a spam issue, so orgs have to be careful not to overuse the medium, but that’s true for direct mail too, so the variable doesn’t change when you move from one communications medium to the other.

2. Therefore, the broader the audience, the better you’ll do.  Prospect Direct Mail (PDM) is a bit like prospecting for gold.  You spend a ton of time and resources  up front sifting through a list, getting a low response rate and losing money.  But the people who respond the first time are much more likely to respond the second, third, and fourth times, so you make up  for all that resource expenditure in later years once you’ve distilled those gold nuggets.  Good starting lists are essential, because if you just used the phonebook, you’d never get high enough returns to justify the up-front investment.  So orgs specialize, buy each others lists, etc.  Part of the early excitement about “microtargeting” came from PDM circles who saw it as an opportunity to get much more refined starting lists, potentially reducing the up-front costs of fundraising.  Groups like MoveOn, DailyKos, and Democracy for America turn this logic on it’s head, though.  Since the medium is near-costless, it pays to be an issue generalist, rather than a silo’ed issue specialist.  MoveOn can work on climate AND the Iraq War, appealing to a broader spectrum of the public in the process.  Groups like Sierra or NOW can’t do this, and got big under a fundraising regime that benefited developing a silo’ed issue specialty.

3. They focus on the top issue of the day.  When Dems were focused on superdelegates, these orgs could move to that issue area, fundraise around it, and engage people in meaningful activism.  Internet-mediated groups can be nimble because of their reliance on the low-transaction-costs medium, and that nimbleness pays dividends because people are always more likely to give money when an issue is urgent and current (read: front-page news). It’s hard for traditional orgs to follow suit here, even if they’re moving their fundraising online, because they are hiring staff and engaging volunteers (if they have volunteer leaders) around long-term priorities.  The Sierra Club wasn’t about to work on Superdelegate accountability last February, both because it’s not our issue area and because, hell, which staffers exactly would we put to work on that instead of their other important work?

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So with that preface, let’s consider these two emails.  The first one is just a fantastic example of how orgs can move their PDM-style fundraising online, but it is not the same as what MoveOn does and it is not likely to make them all that much money.  It’s a sort of grim entertainment, seeing orgs use Convio and thus send out a message that is formatted like a MoveOn e-mail.  But the ask from Michael Town of Save Our Environment was as follows:

“We have less than 48 hours to reach our goal of raising $10,000 by 11:59PM on December 31 – and we’re not there yet…

There are lots of reasons why you should give to SaveOurEnvironment.org right now:

First, because we’re counting on you. [...]

Second, because the year is coming to a close. [...]

And third, because there is no time like the present. The time for excuses is over: America needs strong environmental policies that support a sustainable green economy today. Help us make it happen.”

Save Our Environment is doing only the first of the 3 things I listed above.  They’ve moved their traditional mailer online.  Compare that, however, to the message I got from MoveOn just now:

“Dear MoveOn member, You’ve probably heard about how Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff scammed investors out of at least $50 billion.  But you may not have heard that his victims included the foundations that support some really important progressive organizations.  Groups that fight for human rights, fair elections and racial justice are getting hit hard - just in time for the holidays.  We’ve worked side-by-side with many of them.

If these groups can’t replace the funding that came from investment accounts that Madoff stole, they may be forced to start cutting important projects or, in some cases, even lay off staff.  Can you pitch in $25 or $50 for each of the four organizations we’re highlighting below?  Our friends at Atlantic Philanthropies and the Open Society Institute will each match every dollar that comes in until January 1!  So, for the next three days, your donation of $25 or $50 measn $75 or $150 for groups affected by Madoff. If a few thousand of us give together, it can make an enormous difference — and help repair some of the damage Madoff has done.  Click here to contribute.”

They then go on to note that my year-end contribution will be 100% tax-deductible, and provide brief descriptions of the four organizations.

See the difference?!?  MoveOn is focusing on the top issue-of-the-day, the Madoff scandal and the crumbling economy.  They’re also appealing to a larger swath of the population, and they’re speaking to a much larger audience, beause they’ve become one of the de facto voices of the progressive movement over the past ten years.  And, they’re making clear exactly where your donations will go, and why the few bucks you can afford right now are worth giving.  Usually it’s a commercial they’re putting on the air, but here MoveOn is adding an interesting twist by applying their fundraising approach to smaller allied orgs.

This is not the difference between a well-crafted and a poorly-crafted fundraising appeal.  It is indicative of a difference-in-kind in how organizations raise money.

Moving your PDM appeals online is not good enough.  It may save you mailing and printing costs, which will look good on your books in the short-term, but in the long-term, what we’re seeing is an ecological shift in the available resource base (money).  And that’s going to lead to a new set of organizations thriving while existing orgs are less-able to compete and seriously start to decline.  The same thing happened in the 1970s, when PDM became technologically feasible and the resulting fundraising regime produced the DC advocacy group explosion (before that, we mostly had federated civic groups, as Theda Skocpol describes in Diminished Democracy)

…the other element of the MoveOn e-mail that I have to remark on is that, ohmigod, MoveOn is now fundraising for other frickin organizations.  I’ve talked often about the “MoveOn Effect” and how their fundraising model is changing the political economy of issue advocacy work.  But seeing that effect extend to MoveOn turning around and giving a helping hand to smaller, allied organizations?  Wow.  Just.  Wow.  I mean, ’tis the season and all, but can anybody honestly imagine an older progressive interest group doing this?  The old fundraising model dictated that you guard your list closely, sell it on a limited basis to allied groups, and worry about how often people are getting contacted, since repeated contact will put a damper on response rates.  MoveOn just did something inconcievable in the nonprofit fundraising world, and yet entirely natural for them.  It is a seriously brave new world in the nonprofit sector, and I’ve gotta say that I like how MoveOn continues to act as good stewards of their role at the forefront of the community.

Last night, a friend of mine claimed that blogs have no redeeming value. (He’d had a few beers, so the claim was a bit less, um, polite and articulate; he didn’t know I’m a blogger, so it may have been a good thing I was sober.)

While I’ll grant that many blogs do not have much to say, a good many do, and the very exceptional blogs break news stories by original reporting. Some bloggers actually go out into the field and conduct interviews, take pictures, and make observations. Others break stories by sifting through mountains of data (government documents, corporate reports, congressional hearings, etc.) for otherwise unseen patterns or unexpected tidbits.

FiveThirtyEight.com is the best campaign blog of the season, and it’s because they’ve done an outstanding job of both sifting through mountains of data (polls and demographic variables) and hitting the road to do original reporting. While the statistical analysis is what brought most of the readers to fivethirtyeight, the original reporting from the field is perhaps even more valuable.

Nate Silver, the number-crunching genius who built his reputation on inventive work with Baseball Prospectus, got millions of political junkies hooked with his superior statistical analysis–complete with “win percentages” based on ten thousand daily election simulations. While most news outlets will report their own episodic or tracking poll results, or cherry pick results based on their news value (often placing undue emphasis on outliers), Silver’s steady hand combines demographic data with a thoughtful, detailed poll of polls, at both the state and the national level, to give readers a solid understanding of the state of the election.

The addition of demographic data to the soup has made the site somewhat more sophisticated than simple poll-of-polls sites like Pollster and RealClearPolitics. The “win percentage” numbers are also quite helpful, providing a realistic understanding of what it really means to have an average polling lead of, say, 1.4% in North Carolina (Obama wins 65% of simulations), or a 4.9% lead in Georgia (McCain wins 91%). Silver also deserves much credit for total transparency as to his methods.

While Silver’s number-crunching has been the very best of the season, perhaps the site’s most important contribution has come in the site’s original on-the-ground reporting of both presidential campaigns’ ground games. It doesn’t take a statistical genius–indeed, it takes no genius at all–to know that the ground games make all the difference in close elections.

Here, 538’s On the Road series has been just about the only game in town. Reporter Sean Quinn and photographer Brett Marty simply got in a car and drove across the country, hitting swing state after swing state.

The result? Well, they’ve reported on explosive excitement and volunteer efforts at every Obama field office across the country. And in contrast:

But the other story, the story on which we’ve had a running eight-week exclusive in 36 separate On the Road pieces and counting, is that John McCain’s ground campaign is just not happening. It hasn’t been happening, without Sarah Palin there might be four or five volunteers across the entire nation left, and now, per Mosk’s piece at WaPo, it looks like it will be happening even less.

That a 3-person blog that didn’t exist until this March has this exclusive is amazing–and outrageous. It’s amazing that such a small operation can provide such important insights into what may be the story of the presidential election–the complete reversal of the major parties’ abilities to mobilize supporters on the ground. And it’s outrageous that not a single mainstream news outlet has covered this story, even when it’s been handed to them on a Silver platter. (Wokka.)

If that doesn’t illustrate the power of blogging–the awesome reporting and analysis that occasionally sprouts forth from motivated outsiders–then I don’t know what could.

YouTube’s impact on electoral politics was probably most felt by Senator George Allen (R-VA).  In an unguarded campaign moment, he pointed to an Indian-American supporter of his opponent, Jim Webb, at a campaign rally and called him “Macaca.”  Allen maybe didn’t know about YouTube.  The resulting firestorm contributed to his plummenting poll numbers and is widely credited as a decisive moment in Webb’s eventual narrow victory.

Political scientists with an interest in online politics have been widely discussing the impact that Youtube will have on the 2008 election.  There will be a conference on it in April, which will culminate in a special issue of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics.  I expected to stay out of the fray with this one, myself, because my stance generally is that YouTube is just one in a whole suite of new tools that take advantage of the conditions of online information abundance and ridiculously low transaction costs to produce a new political environment. I would classify studies of “YouTube and the 2008 election” of running the same risk as studies of “canvassing and the 2008 election” or “phone banking and the 2008 election.”  Yes, it’s important.  But isolating it as a variable can be a tad bit weird.

That said, 2008’s “Macaca moment” pretty clearly just happened on Friday, and color me interested in the results.  Michelle Bachmann (R-MN06) was playing the role of loyal McCain surrogate on Hardball with Chris Matthews when the following exchange occurred:

MATTHEWS: So you think Barack Obama may have anti-American views?

BACHMANN: Absolutely. I’m very concerned that he may have anti-American views.

[...]

MATTHEWS: How many Congresspeople, members of Congress, are in that anti-American crowd you describe? How many Congresspeople that you serve with?

BACHMANN: Right now —

MATTHEWS: How many are anti-American in the Congress right now that you serve with?

BACHMANN: You’d have to ask them, Chris. I’m focusing on Barack Obama and the people that he’s been associated with and I’m very worried about their anti-American nature.

MATTHEWS: But do you suspect there are a lot of people you serve with — well, he’s the United States senator from Illinois, he’s one of the people you suspect as being anti-American. How many people in Congress of the United States do you believe are ant-American? Is he alone or are there others? How many do you suspect of your colleagues of being anti-American.

BACHMANN: What I would say what I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating exposé and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think people would be — would love to see an expose like that.

Wow.  “The news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look… into whether people in Congress are pro-America or anti-America.”  Wow.  On a scale of zero to stupid, Bachmann pretty much just broke the meter.  Of course, so far this is a cable tv effect — the 24-hour news networks need to be fed, they need a ton of surrogates, and that means that someone, somewhere, is going to eventually say something stupid.  Once they do, that becomes the topic of discussion for the news cycle.  It’ll be replaced and forgotten in a few days.  Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment is already such old news that I can barely remember it.  By April, that reference will basically have disappeared from the radar.

Ah, but the magic of YouTube.  Or, more specifically, the magic of embedded YouTube clips in the hands of elite progressive bloggers.  Like I said, YouTube is just one of many tools.  It contributes to a pervasive media environment in which information is nearly frictionless, and filtering is the dominant challenge.  The elite progressive blogosphere showed immense interest in this topic, seizing on it as the latest example of claw-your-eyes-out desperation on the part of the Right.  Did she just call for a renewed House Unamerican Activities Commision?  Joe McCarthy called, he wants his schtick back.

I argue in a totally-unpolished chapter of my dissertation that in the new online media environment, the central challenge to effective collective action is no longer the Free Ridership.  Wikipedia is a great example of a pure public good that, contrary to four decades of political economic theory-building, is anything but underprovided.  With transaction costs as low as they are, the overwhelming challenge to collective action lies in filtering.  The power law distributions that have been noted elsewhere as defining web traffic help to solve this mass coordination problem, leading to overwhelming hubs such as DailyKos and HuffingtonPost.

Bachmann has just become the latest example of what happens when a politician essentially volunteers as the coordination point for outreach and action from online activists.  Over the course of the weekend, Bachmann’s opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, received over $700,000 in online donations.  Visitors to DailyKos and OpenLeft were pointed in the direction of his ActBlue page, helping to funnel $300,000+ through that portal alone.  To put those numbers in perspective, Tinklenberg apparently raised roughly $1,000,000 for the entire 3rd quarter of 2008.  That’s simply a massive, game-changing tide of money.  The Cook Political Report reponded to all this action on Monday, moving the MN-06 race from “Leans Republican” to “Toss Up” status.  We’ll have to see in two weeks whether it bears electoral fruit.

Kos provides some great insight into the scuffle here.  In short, he points out that many elected officials have not adapted to the new information environment in which their attempts at spin can be placed directly next to their original words.  Bachmann has tried to claim that the liberal media is twisting her words.  That’s a lot harder to do when her words themselves are placed prominently on display, in context, at a moments’ notice.  The online information environment is one where data doesn’t dissipate into the ether.  Instead, it lies there in the soup, waiting for an elite actor with a giant audience to dip in and rescue it from obscurity.  And in this environment, losing the news cycle can have much greater consequences than it used to.  $700K in a weekend.  Game-changing money, and a potential change in electoral outcome, all because of a stupid TV interview.  That, my friends, is the effect of YouTube (looped in with a suite of other tools, and placed in the hands of an emerging set of new interest group elites) on 21st century electoral politics.

[And yeah, if Tinklenberg pulls this thing off, you can pretty much count on seeing this blog post, in updated form and with plenty of data behind it, as a conference paper submission from me in April.  For any other internet & politics researchers out there, this is me calling dibs!]

It turns out that beverage companies and shoe manufacturers aren’t the only ones trying to reach TV-disconnected males, ages 18-34.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama is making history again, buying campaign ads in Microsoft X-Box Live games. This is the first video game ad buy for a political campaign.

The ad buy reaches gamers in swing states with internet-connected X-Box systems. Ads appear in games such as Burnout and Madden NFL 09.

This is smart of the Obama campaign. He has an unbelievable edge among young voters, leading in polls by anywhere from 15 to 35 points. (Kerry, a far less exciting candidate, won the youth vote by 9 points.)

The ads are a reasonable development at a time in which young people, especially young men, watch TV (via television sets, at least) in rapidly diminishing numbers. The strategy complements the campaign’s well-documented push with web ads, social networking sites, and distributed peer-to-peer campaigning.

How taken-for-granted is it that young folks are better reached in nontraditional ways? One tech blog dismisses this historic development: “Obama ads in video games? So what?”

For a campaign with a boatload of cash, a huge edge in the historically under-represented youth demographic, and an all-of-the-above strategy for turning them out to the polls, this is quite a smart play.

(Source: Josh Grumet, one of my colleagues at Hunter.)