The boffins at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich conducted an interesting study and statistical analysis of fundraising data before and after the 2004 South-Eastern Asia tsunami disaster. What they uncovered is that we humans are pretty darn predictable and we all follow universal behaviors regardless of our country of origin when it comes to making donations. So what did the folks in Zurich conclude?

1. Time dictates the number and amounts of donations. There is a “logistic growth equation” based on when a disaster takes place.
2.  ”Herding behavior” plays and importan role on how individual donors affect each other.
3. The donation volume pattern matches SIR infectious disease transmission models.

All this adds up to the fact that in terms of charitable giving, people give in the the same way they catch a contagious disease… ewwww.

Let me rephrase that. Donation trends move through a population in the same quantitative maner as a virus  moves through a population. You have a population of Susceptible (prospective donors), Infected (donors), and Recovered (people who have given… or died from the disease). The giving pattern moves through the population in a very predictable maner, just like FriendFace, or social herding, driven by the media or social networks.

The figure below is from the ETH study and shows the spike in donations after the tsunami.

Take-Aways

So what does that mean for us fundraisers? One of the most interesting take-aways is that we may be able to accurately predict the pattern and volume of donations based on the size of potential donor populations and the amount of mass media promotion for a specific event or disaster. If you are a quant, here is the original study with equations.

The second is that to fundraise, you must have a trigger event. This is easy in politics. You have election day, You have primaries. You have a constant stream of rallys and press events. Take each one of these events and use them to infect prospective donors.

If you are a simple nonprofit looking for operational funding, then your path is harder. You must artificially create events to infect your prospects. This is why there are something-A-Thons, winter banquets, college reunions and girl scout cookies. You must create an event and expect your donation flow to match the path of the graph above. Once the donation flow starts slowing down, it is time to start working on your next event. For any fundraising effort to succeed, the critical path includes:

1. A trigger event ,
2. A platform to drive interaction (to infect supporters). This could be mail, traditional media, new media, social media, or old school cocktail party/over the fence chatter.
3. An easy method for a infected prospect to make a gift such as a online donation page or phone number to call.

Good luck fundraisers and it is time to start thinking like a epidemiologist.

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A version of this post was also published on the Campaigns & Elections Campaign Insider blog.

Firms are putting pressure on the Federal Election Commission to give its blessing to text-message campaign contributions. For those in the Beltway last cycle, you may remember that “text-to-donate” was the hot snake oil of 2010. Several companies and consultants tried to ride the buzz of the successful Haiti text-donation efforts.

Text-message contributions aren’t allowed under federal law. But there are reports that firms are upping the pressure on the FEC to make a change. Supporters point out that text donations have proved successful for charitable giving.

After Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010, more than $32 million was raised through mobile giving. The cellular network providers facilitated the text fundraising efforts and waved their typical texting fees of about 50 percent. It won’t be so easy, though, when it comes to political contributions.

The Verizons & AT&Ts of the world aren’t soft hearted when politics is involved. Maryland and California have allowed text-message contributions for state-level candidates. Maryland hasn’t held a statewide race since it changed its rules and in California, party officials have complained that cell providers haven’t offered the service.

Other problems around collecting political donation via a text message include:

• The donations are not forwarded to the campaign until well after the billing cycle. This is no good if a campaign needs their funds right away to buy ads or support GOTV efforts.
• The donations are only tagged with the donor’s cell number. Not their name, address, occupation and employer as required by the FEC. Telecommunications companies are going to have to change their policy and provide far more information about donors to make the FEC happy.

Political fundraisers have ways to get around these problems such having donors send a text and then having a phone bank call the prospect back for her donor and credit card info.

Another technique is to have donors send a text and then they would receive a link to a donation page via text. The benefits of these two strategies is that the campaign would have phone numbers of prospective donors. The down side is that the campaign doesn’t receive a corresponding name for the prospect who responded to the call-to-action.

Needless to say, neither of these strategies notched any significant fundraising success. One large Midwestern Republican state party tried something similar at its big annual fundraiser banquet. They hired a vendor who promised them fundraising riches. At the event a text-to-donate number was flashed on massive screens around the event. Phone bank operators were poised to call donors back to process their donation. When the event was over, a grand total of $143 was collected.

Lots of other campaigns took shots at text donations and few, if any, struck fundraising gold. Evidence of the text-to-donate bubble bursting is the fact that after working on six presidential campaigns and three national committees this cycle, no one has entered text based donation data into our systems.

Will the FEC let campaigns process donations via text? I believe the FEC would like to provide this option. Their current stance is to embrace technology so more people can be involved in politics. The problem is that they need the mobile carriers to play along and provide information on the donors so you don’t have donors going over their limits.

Campaigns also have to be comfortable with waiting 35-plus days for their donations. This means text donations will not be attractive to campaigns come October or even September. The mobile carriers have to be concerned about chargebacks, too. What if they pass a donation on to a candidate and the donor changes her mind or didn’t understand that her text was incurring a donation on their mobile phone bill? Moreover, the carriers will have a difficult time getting their money back from a campaign that has lost and closed its doors.

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A version of this post was also published on the Campaigns & Elections Campaign Insider blog.

WealthEngine’s systems have been developing for decades and now serve over 2,500 organizations, offering the broadest range and highest quality of wealth data, the strongest technology and the most experienced staff in the industry.

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During the month of May, for the price of one max-out donation, you will receive:

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As the fundraising season moves into the general elections phase, you will need every tool in your arsenal to identify and target prospective max-out donors.

The Crimson/WealthEngine partnership allows you to pull up any of your current donors and evaluate their potential to give by utilizing 1000+ wealth indicators and 30 data sources. Prioritize your prospective donors based on real data, not intuition.

WealthEngine data points include:

• The patented “Propensity to Give (P2G™)” score (which includes data on assets, lifestyle, real estate, etc)
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• Federal and State donations database with 23 million data points

Don’t miss this brand new opportunity to capitalize on fresh donor information in your districts at a price only good for a limited time.

For more information, please contact us or call 703-790-8676.

This introductory pricing is only available to campaigns using CMDI’s Crimson database system integrated with WealthEngine’s FindWealth Online.

The premise of the article is that forms are a key part of most websites and there is no reason not to make them attractive and highly usable.

The reason the TNW posting “spoke” to me is that much of our business revolves around making highly usable political donation forms that remove the friction from online fundraising. In fact, we’ve spent a ton of time making WidgetMakr, our fundraising form builder, highly customizable.

Each of our clients knows their supporters and their own campaign’s needs better than we ever could. That means that we need to give our clients total control over the look, feel and even the data fields of their fundraising forms.  Obviously not all clients have the mad design skills required to create unique sexy forms. That being said, we are seeing some very creative efforts out there.

The elephant in the webform design world that the TNW article doesn’t address is A/B testing. No matter how beautiful a form is, it needs to be as productive as possible. We’ve seen changes in donation form design increase the yield of a donation page by over 40%. It is crazy what a huge affect colors and field size can have in terms of usability.

Interestingly, some of our clients will create multiple WidgetMakr landing page forms, in some cases up to 20 variations, for each of their emailed fundraising solicitations. The client then A/B tests all the forms in real time to find the highest yielding fundraising form.

It is great fun to see our tools used in such creatative ways.

Since WidgetMakr’s release in August its usage has been growing consistently by 500% a month. Our hockey stick growth numbers are pretty crazy exponential numbers for a brand new product. WidgetMakr has become THE online tool of choice for major senatorial & congressional campaigns around the country.

WidgetMakr’s rapid success is really based on 3 factors:

1. Total control over the look, feel & content of your donation page. WidgetMakr makes it easy to make your donation forms match the messaging, look and feel of your site. Don’t get stuck with a cookie cutter donation form from folks that don’t understand your supporters. You can even add your own custom fields.
2. Your donations go straight into your account. Don’t wait while someone else sits on your money for weeks at a time. WidgetMakr directs your funds directly into your bank account as fast as the credit card processors can process the donation.
3. Complete integration with America’s leading political fundraising platform, Crimson. As soon as a donation is processed in WidetMakr, a record is created in Crimson. Clean online political donation data makes your state and federal election committee filings a snap!

Whats New?

The latest version WidgetMakr really ups the bar for online fundraising. New features include:

• Personal Fundraising Pages – Your supporters want to help you. Make it easy by allowing supporters to create their own personal fundraising pages. With personal donation pages a supporter can tell their own story about what your organization means to them and why their friends should support you.
• Social Sharing - When your supporters are making a donation, this is the moment they are feeling the most love for your organization. WidgetMakr makes it easy for your supporters to show the world their love. Once a donor completes a donation, they now have the opportunity to promote your organization among their social networks.
• Mobile Optimized Donation Forms - WidgetMakr forms have been optimized for the mobile world which we now live. Donations via iPhone, iPad, Android phones & pads are a piece of cake with WidgetMakr.
• Google Analytics & Cookies - Do you love Google Analytics? So do we. WidgetMakr now allows you to embed tracking scripts like Google Analytics or JavaScript based cookies so you can tract the performance of your donation forms. This gives you the ability to create lots of different forms and track each forms performance to see which appeal is most effective.
• Custom Form Fields - Collect whatever information you need, survey questions, event planing, market research, feedback, yard sign requests… any thing you could possiblely need to know from your supporters, you can create a field for it.
• Custom CSS – Don’t be scared. You don’t need to be able to write a lick of code to use WidgetMakr. But… if you have the tech chops and really want to get crazy, you can right your own custom CSS to take total control over your donation form.
• Dashboards, dashboards and more dashboards – Once you release your donation forms into the wild, the new WidgetMakr dashboards live data streaming make it easy for you to track all your initiatives and all your supporters personal donation pages.
• Facebook Login – Who needs yet another user name & password in their lives? Simplify your life and use your Facebook Login credentials for WidgetMakr.

It doesn’t end here. There are lots more cool tweaks and features. Learn more at our shinny new WidgetMakr website. Some of our beta testers claim that WidgetMakr even makes them better looking but we haven’t been able to confirm these reports. If you find that using WidgetMakr makes you better looking, please let us know right away.

The real reason you should go is to see Ginny Badanes, CMDI Director of Political, and Seamus Owens, Congressional & Senatorial Campaign Specialist. They will teach you how to successfully fundraise and manage your fundraising data while keeping your campaign FEC compliant.

Managing campaign data is becoming a critical part of running a successful race, especially in terms of fundraising. If you don’t know who your prospects are, who your donors are, where, when, and how much they’ve given, you are not running an effective finance team.

Ginny and Seamus are industry pros and have been behind the fundraising of billions (that is not a type-o) of dollars raised for the Republican party and its candidates.

See them this week only at the Republican National Committee headquarters on 1st Street on the Hill, and please… try the veal.

why do I care that Crimson only serves Republican campaigns and organizations?

You should. In terms of winning and losing, do you want your fees being used by a company to advance a product that could or will be used by your political competitor?

It used to be that political fundraising was all about your list, i.e. your contacts who were previous donors. The better your list, the more money you could raise and the quality of your list was your competitive advantage. Because of the importance of your list, you would never let it leave your possession, let alone store it at a company that might intentionally or unintentionally leak it to your competitor or the competing party.

In the current computing environment, campaigns are far more comfortable uploading and managing their mission critical data into the cloud. We all now use services like Gmail, Google Docs, iCloud, DropBox, etc, to store and share our work. We use Visa/Mastercard to process our donations and Microsoft to manage data. We don’t care if these tools are Republican or Democrat. These are big, mass market software solutions that will live or die based on the adherence to privacy policies. If they leak data, they will face severe penalties or go out of business.

Partisanship becomes more important when a political campaign is looking for a competitive advantage. Political specific software such as NGP, Aristotle, Piryx, CompleteCampaigns, and our own beloved Crimson are all tools campaigns use to to win campaigns.

In the grand scheme, all these political software companies are small when compared to Google, Apple or Microsoft and they are dependent on their clients winning to stay in business. To win, these companies have to innovate so they can provide the best possible tools to their clients. Makes sense, right?

But, if you are a bi-partisan company, you are taking Republican revenues to make advances to your product in ways that could be used by Democratic campaigns and visa-versa. Literally, the fees your are paying this campaign season could be used to improve the product for your competitor in 2014.

This alone makes me very uncomfortable.

Does a bi-partisan company really care if you win or lose if they are providing services to your competitor? By choosing a partisan vendor, you are assuring yourself that their interests are very closely aligned to your own. Not only are they serving you in exchange for fees but it is important to the partisan vendor that you win your race.

Take-away: make sure you are taking partisanship into consideration when you make your next political software buying decision.

Following is the Aristotle press release, with my corrections/additions marked in bold.

March 31st FEC filings show campaigns with sophisticated software raised $342,430 $2,192,741 more on average ($2 million is a lot more than Aristotle’s $342K) –Patent-Pending Data Mining Techniques Powering 2012 Fundraising Success

WASHINGTON, April 19, 2012  – Reports filed by 1,357 candidates and party committees with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) Sunday night show that campaigns using Aristotle CMDI’s Crimson software are doing significantly better in fundraising than those who use any one of the three four next most popular products.

The results include Democrats, Republicans, challengers, incumbents and open seat campaigns and party committees that were required to file their financial disclosure reports electronically for the first quarter of 2012. The FEC tallies the technology used by each committee to file their reports.

On average, of 1357 campaign committees listed, those using Aristotle CMDI’s Crimson raised an average of $809,058 $3,001,800. Those using Aristotle raised $808,058, which was on average 73.1%  less than Crimson clients. Those using NGP raised $466,628, which was on average 44.7%  84.5% less than Aristotle  Crimson clients; FECFile clients raised $135,575 on average; and NetFile clients raised $285,365 on average, according to the reports filed with the FEC.

“If anyone needed proof that powerful data mining works, this is it,” said Aristotle CEO John Aristotle Phillips. “This is a very substantial financial advantage made possible by patent-pending data mining. Show me a campaign that could not benefit from an additional $342,430.

“We give campaigns the tools to find those who want to give, and make it easy for the contribution to be made, legally. We allow fundraisers to access, mine and harness millions of state contributor records so that no money is left on the table.”

“I concur,” stated CMDI VP of Marketing & Sales Erik Nilsson (and author of this post). “Giving campaigns access to real time fundraising data allows them to make and execute upon the best possible fundraising strategies.”

Aristotle’s platform incorporates detailed state contributor and voter lists with highly accurate consumer databases to illuminate exactly how much a donor has given, how much they can give, and to suggest the maximum they might agree to contribute where allowed by law.

CMDI’s Crimson also allows campaigns to utilize any and all types of lists. Crimson can super-charge a campaign’s ability to raise funds by:

1. empowering the campaign to leverage the power of supporters through the recruitment and tracking of volunteer fundraisers,
2. real-time tracking of all fundraising activities,
3. full integration with WidgetMakr, the premiere online political social fundraising tool. 

Aristotle is non-partisan. “Our place is not to pick candidates or parties we may agree with, but rather to provide all candidates and all parties and every advocacy group the tools they need to get their message out, to compete at the ballot box, so the voters can decide,” said Phillips. “We are a non-partisan provider because we believe in the democratic process.”

Conversely, CMDI’s Crimson is the backbone to the Republican party. Since 2008, more than 55% of all Republican federal donations were managed through Crimson. To date, $7.5 billion in Republican dollars have been processed by CMDI. In the 2012 presidential cycle alone, Crimson is/was utilized by 6 of the leading Republican candidates.

If you are a Republican candidate, do you want your fees going to support the R&D and product advancement of software that will benefit Democratic candidates?

“Campaigns using Aristotle’s products not only raise more money, we also guarantee compliance,” former FEC Chairman and Aristotle Senior Vice President of Compliance Services David Mason said. “The Aristotle system safeguards campaigns against embarrassing stories that could potentially derail a campaign.”

Over 7,500 FEC compliance reports have been generated and submitted through CMDI. The fact that all major Republican national committees utilize Crimson for their compliance rather than our honorable competitors speaks volumes for the quality and security of the Crimson compliance toolset.

Discovery’s last mission was in February last year (2011) and it will now live at the Simthsonian’s Northern VA annex.

Here is the Associated Press’s coverage of Discovery’s DC fly-by.: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-space-shuttle-discovery–20120417,0,4814054.story 

Here are other pictures of Discovery when it was over the Hill. Again a cell phone camera doesn’t do Discovery justice:

By RICHARD LARDNER and STEPHEN BRAUN Associated Press

WASHINGTON March 27, 2012 (AP)

Mitt Romney’s presidential fundraising operation dwarfs those of his Republican rivals, with more than $75 million already in donations. It also operates mysteriously at times, withholding the names of Romney’s major fundraisers who have helped amass much of its money.

Now, a review by The Associated Press of campaign records and other records provides clues to the vast national network of business leaders bringing in millions to put Romney in the Oval Office. The AP’s review identified dozens of people who fit the profile of top Romney fundraisers, known as “bundlers” for their ability to sweep up donations from wealthy acquaintances and steer them to campaigns…

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/romneys-fundraisers-quietly-amassing-millions-16009056