(Source: Business Week)
Four days before Senator Hillary Clinton conceded the Democratic nomination to Senator Barack Obama, she made a final, thinly veiled appeal to her supporters for cash. "I hope you'll go to my Web site," she said. "Share your thoughts with me, and help in any way you can."
The request hinted at a key failing of Clinton's online fund-raising strategy [BusinessWeek.com, 3/5/08]. Obama wasn't asking supporters to come to his Web site to give money. His campaign was bringing donation tools to sites where Web surfers already hung out: YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, blogs, and wherever else supporters could post Obama's campaign slogan and a bit of code.
The result is that donating to Obama's campaign has become impulse-buy easy. Feeling inspired by an Obama speech on YouTube (GOOG)? There's a place to donate up to $1,000 right beside the video player on his YouTube channel. Been meaning to get more politically involved like your friends on Facebook? Just click on the Obama picture next to their social network profiles to go straight to a donation site on the social network.
"This is the first year -- with Web 2.0 -- that candidates gave the tools to the voters allowing them to help raise money," says Ravi Singh, CEO of ElectionMall.com, a nonpartisan software-as-a-service firm that helps candidates raise money online. "That is a big paradigm shift."
The Obama-Everywhere Strategy Obama's campaign was among the first to embrace shareable Web programs, known as widgets, that allow users to host the equivalent of "donate here" buttons on their site. The Obama campaign's social network, MyBarackObama.com, includes a page that specifically invites users to copy codes that install campaign logos, photos, and icons on their personal Web sites, which then link back to a campaign donation page. Members of Obama's social network also share widgets that are often created on such other sites as ChipIn.com, and that can collect money for their candidate without making donors visit another page.
The Obama-everywhere strategy is a big part of why the candidate raised more than $105 million in the first six months of the year, compared with Senator John McCain's $76 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In July, Obama's fund-raising nearly doubled that of his rival, generating $51 million. In campaign filings with the Federal Election Commission, candidates need not report whether the money comes from online donations, mailed-in checks, or personally delivered cash. But Obama's campaign said earlier this year that as much as 88% of donations stemmed from online sources.
