Liminal states

revised and updated version to be published during the week of 10/6

It seems to me that it’s a pretty interesting story that One Million Strong now has fundraising potential on roughly the same level as well-known progressive blogs OpenLeft and myDD — especially in an election where there’s been so much focus on Obama supporters “looking like Facebook”, the campaign’s innovative use of the my.barackobama.com social network site, and Obama’s huge advantage with the youth vote. Hopefully some enterprising bloggers and journalists will cover it.  Campus newspapers are an obvious sweet spot; and so are Obama-supporting blogospheres like the black blogosphere and progressive blogosphere.

Read on for more …

The Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) Facebook group is in the midst of its October moneybomb to scare McCain fundraising drive, with a goal of raising $15K by October 15th to push the group’s total to $40K.  It’s an ambitious goal; while the group has over 760,000 members (up 40,000 since the last time I checked a few weeks ago), nobody knows how many follow the discussion board actively.

As calibration, here’s how some well-know progressive blogs did with their September fundraising:

• myDD originally set a goal of getting to 120 donors and $10,000 raised via their Road To 60 ActBlue page, and as Todd Beeton’s On Reaching for 60 describes, beat it handily: 136 donors as of the end of September, and somewhere around $13,000*, for an average of about $90/donor.
• OpenLeft’s Crisis Moment set a goal of 100 new donations via their Better Democrats page in 24 hours, and the title of Matt Stoller’s post tells the story UPDATED: We’re at 97 and Need 3 More…. At 99… Will YOU Be the 100th Donor?… WE DID IT!!!.  This pushes the total of their fundraising drive over $25K**, and with an average donation of roughly $100, probably means they raised around $10,000.
• Daily Kos somewhat nervously set a goal of $100,000 for their end-of-quarter Orange to Blue fundraising drive and then proceeded to blow it away … no, really: 3524 donors, $364,397.  Wow!  Miss Laura’s Deadline 12:00 EDT highlights that this brings Orange to Blue’s totals to $800,000.  Wow!  Or did I say that already?

So yeah, One Million Strong’s group is indeed ambitious: if successful, it would be at #2 behind the Kossian juggernaut.

Things are off to a good start, with Tim Chambers doing a great job of keeping people informed in the $15K for the 15th thread: over 60 donations, and $2700 raised.   At $45/donation, this is higher than One Million Strong’s historical average of $30;*** my guess is that means that students, who usually make smaller contributions, were tapped out in September with school starting up and couldn’t give.  If a flood of them start tossing in $5/$10/$20 a pop over the next ten days, we’ll see the average decrease as the totals start to climb.

There are a couple of major challenges for One Million Strong’s fundraising.  First is that there are a lot of other ways for people to give money to Obama — many of which offer goodies like free t-shirts or a chance to meet famous people.  By contrast, there’s no economic reason for people to give via One Million Strong’s page.  On the other hand, as with the progressive blogosphere’s campaigns, there is a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself: the sense of shared accomplishment working with the people in your community to achieve a difficult goal.

An even bigger challenge, as anybody who’s ever been in a large Facebook group could probably guess, is communications.  Once a group reaches 5000 people, the admins can’t send a message to all members … so there’s no good way to alert everybody.  To catch people’s attention, it’s highlighted on the group’s Recent News at the top of the page, and the thread on the discussion board gets bumped pretty regularly … but very few first-time visitors don’t spend much time exploring, and most long-term members check back very rarely.

Fortunately, there are other options.  For one thing, there are a lot of groups of Obama supporters on Facebook with less than 5,000 people, and Tim’s been messaging the administrators and asking them to send out information to their members.  This needs to be timed judiciously — good admins are careful to message-all-members very infrequently — but with luck this will result in a lot of reminders in the next ten days.

Also, there’s the Million Strong Money Bomb event.  Events propagate very quickly on Facebook: it’s easy to invite 50 or more friends at a time.  So far, about 300 of the 650 people who have been invited have responded, with 51 accepting (presumably meaning they’ve given or plan to give), and while that may not doesn’t seem like a lot, the key is to think of them as the hubs of networks of friends. If I’ve done the math right, all we need is each person to respond to invite 50 friends, and we’ve got a good shot at beating the $15K goal.****  And if network effects start to kick in, and those friends start to invite their friends … oh baby.

And as with any online fundraising campaign, something else that would help a lot is attention from blogs and media.  It seems to me that it’s a pretty interesting story that One Million Strong now has fundraising potential on roughly the same level as well-known progressive blogs OpenLeft and myDD — especially in an election where there’s been so much focus on Obama supporters “looking like Facebook”, the campaign’s innovative use of the my.barackobama.com social network site, and Obama’s huge advantage with the youth vote. Hopefully some enterprising bloggers and journalists will cover it.

Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky — for example, Campus Progress and pusback.org get excited about this, and the Afrosphere partner with historically black colleges and universities and their alumni networks to get the word out.  Or imagine if OpenLeft, myDD, and Daily Kos each devoted a front-page post to the One Million Strong Money Bomb … or, for that matter, if the large sites like TPM and ThinkProgress that didn’t do their own fundraising campaigns decided to highlight this one instead. The progressive blogosphere has almost completely ignored Obama activism on Facebook so far (although the mainstream media has paid some attention) … at some point they’ll wake up, and it might as well be now.  So if you know any journalists and bloggers, please pitch the story to them!

Realistically, though, it’s a mistake to rely on anything like that happening.   So like most fundraising campaigns, it’s going to take everybody rolling up their sleeves and getting to work: getting the word out and asking people to give via Facebook, email, and blog posts.

Like this one.

Please donate now. As the group’s Recent News says:

One KEY advantage Barack could have is a MONEY advantage. Money equals more commercials, more ground forces in more places, and a stronger message.

Even with the RNC getting HUGE checks from big donors, Barack has been out doing them on PEOPLE POWERED checks of 20 bucks or less. As we move towards what may be as close an election as Bush/Gore we need to give Barack every possible tool to win.

Let’s make ONE MORE BIG MONEY BOMB at the END OF THIS MONTH, and then FINALLY AT OCT 15th. In time to be of REAL USE for the last weeks.

So far this group has raised $25 thousand dollars for the campaign. That is pretty amazing. Our average donation was 30 bucks.

Give here to be counted in this group money bomb:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/millionstrong

jon

* I couldn’t find a reference for the exact amount raised by the end of September; current totals on their ActBlue page are 144 and $13,298.

** 268 donors, $26,598 as I write this

*** roughly $30/donation: 854 donors, $27,650.  The much smaller Troll Donation Fund, with $324 from 14 people has a slightly lower average, about $24/donation.

**** simplifying greatly, suppose the 300 people who have responded so far invite 15,000 people, of whom about 8% donate (1200) an average of $30 = $36K.  And that’s just with one round of invites; presumably a lot of the new people will also invite their friends.  It’s easy to imagine this reaching a million or more people over the course of a few weeks.  And a great thing about events is that Facebook tracks whether or not you’ve been invited, and doesn’t notify you each time a different friend of yours invites you — this helps keep inboxes from getting overwhelmed.