What can you do to resist in the age of Trump? We’ve seen an explosion of progressive energy in 2017, from the Women’s March to protests against the Muslim ban to massively improved Democratic performance in special elections in two very red House districts. But we need to know what else we can do, how we can do what we’re doing better, and how to keep that energy high and make it effective. This is the first in a planned—if occasional—series of interviews with people who can help give us those tools and knowledge. And just to show how much 2017 has exceeded expectations, check out the first question, which I wrote shortly before Jon Ossoff exploded onto the scene!
Erin Hill is the executive director of ActBlue, which you may be familiar with. ActBlue has raised more than $1.6 billion since 2004, and Republicans keep trying and failing to build their own version. If you’ve given through ActBlue—maybe to a Daily Kos-endorsed candidate—and want to know more about how it works and how you can make the most of it, here you go:
We usually think of ActBlue for election giving, and we're in an off-year. What uses does ActBlue have for 2017?
Not sure off-years exist anymore! We are increasingly seeing donors using ActBlue to support advocacy organizations, committees, and nonprofits, whose work isn’t tied to an election calendar. Plus, we always expected 2017 to be busy—a new administration means there are appointments and special elections to fill those seats. There are off-year state elections and gubernatorials in New Jersey and Virginia. At the same time, there are municipal elections across the country and ActBlue has been proud to work with more and more local candidates.
So, we expected donors to be interested in plenty of campaigns and causes in 2017. What we’re actually seeing happen is even more exciting! Since the beginning of the year, we have been seeing an unprecedented rise in activism and donation volume. We handled more than five times as many contributions in the first quarter of this year as we did during the same period in 2015. More ActBlue Express users signed up in January, February, and March individually than in October, when the election was in full swing. And, most excitingly, donors are giving to a wide array of campaigns and causes—more than 3,000 different campaigns, committees, and nonprofits have received funds in 2017 alone. That is nearly double the number of organizations who had received contributions during this same time period in 2015.
Of course, all of you at Daily Kos know this! It has been amazing to see the energy and activism from the Daily Kos community across a wide range of issues and campaigns, but especially all the rallying around the special election for Jon Ossoff in Georgia. Your fundraising and Daily Kos reader contributions have really put that race on the national map—you’re showing how powerful the resistance can be.
I tend to think of ActBlue as a tool either for giving, as an individual, to a candidate, or for an organization like Daily Kos to do big fundraising. What is the middle ground? How can an individual use it to organize?
First and foremost, you should make a point of sharing the grassroots contributions you’re making! Whether it’s on social media or with your friends and family in person, let folks know just how many people are giving small-dollar donations and how powerful they are. We hear about big money in politics and the dangers of Citizens United and the Koch Brothers in the news all the time. It’s easy for people to be discouraged and think that their voices don’t matter. But, as we’ve seen with the recent marches, town halls, and all the calls to congressional offices, we are powerful when we work together and make our voices heard. ActBlue is entirely focused on empowering individuals and giving us all a quantifiable, meaningful path to participation. If you give $5 to a fundraising email you receive from a campaign or from Daily Kos, let your friends and family know that you did that! It might inspire more of them to take action, too.
You can also use ActBlue to organize your friends, family, and contacts in your own community, by creating your own contribution form with a slate of candidates or causes that matter to you most. With ActBlue’s forms you can list your local school committee election, an environmental advocacy organization, and a US senator who just held the Trump administration accountable in a public hearing. All those groups can be on the same contribution form along with your personal story explaining why you picked them.
Creating your own form and sharing it with your network is an easy way to organize for the causes that matter most to you and a powerful way to engage your personal network. If your friends and family are anything like mine, they are feeling motivated but overwhelmed by the news of the
day. They want to take action, but they’re not sure where to focus their dollars and their energy. Daily Kos readers and contributors are informed and involved! Setting up personal contribution forms can be a way of taking that knowledge and helping their contacts deploy it in a tangible, meaningful way.
ActBlue has grown enormously over the years and I'm sure you have a ton of information about how fundraising works, but what has caught you off guard?
If we want more and more people to participate, contributing needs to be easy for donors. But, the way we use technology and our expectations for “easy” are constantly evolving, so we are continually testing different layouts and features to find what works best for the widest swath of donors. And thank goodness for the data we collect, because no amount of expertise would lead us to pick the winning layout every time. I am humbled each time we run a test!
For example, we know that whenever we can save a donor from having to fill out another field, it’s usually a win. We work hard to find those opportunities and make the donor experience even easier. One of the ways we do that is when a donor enters a zip code, we automatically populate
the contribution form with their corresponding city and state. No brainer, right? The first time we implemented that improvement, the layout with the automatic city and state actually failed. We were
surprised, because saving donors a line of text is almost always a winner! Turns out that in our first implementation, the problem was how the autofill was appearing to donors. We tried it again with a different layout and the autofill became a clear winner. But this is why we always test and we don’t release any feature that isn’t proven to make the contribution process better and easier for donors. Over the years at ActBlue, many lessons like that have reminded me never to trust assumptions!
Have there been big fundraising spikes you didn't expect, or times you expected a spike and there wasn't one?
Donors respond quickly when someone, say Steve King, says something that needs a harsh and immediate rebuke. But, it’s still rare and exciting to see an organic, positive moment. Case in point: last year, while campaigning, a bird landed on Bernie Sanders’ podium. It quickly became meme’d and immediately there was a large and unexpected turnout of small-dollar contributions. Donors wanted to offer positive feedback and then to buy the (very popular) Birdie stickers that the campaign created right away.
What lessons do you draw from that?
Campaigns and organizations need to be nimble enough to respond to a fast-changing situation (like the Sanders campaign realizing this was an iconic moment and designing the Birdie stickers immediately), and they need to be able to trust that their platform can handle all the traffic those situations can bring. If small-dollar donors are taking time out of their busy lives to support your campaign or cause, you need to have infrastructure that works and makes it very easy for them to
contribute.
At ActBlue we spend a lot of time building out our infrastructure for those big moments. We see it as our duty to the progressive movement. It will never make sense for a campaign or organization—even a big one like a presidential campaign—to invest resources in planning for a huge, unexpected moment. You never know when (or if) they’ll arrive, and that would be a foolish use of staff time. We’re a nonprofit dedicated to empowering grassroots donors and making small-dollar contributions easy and efficient. That’s why we’re so focused on making sure our platform is rigorously tested and we continue to innovate—so that every campaign and organization can use our platform, and connect with small-dollar donors whenever the moment calls for it.
And we’re very grateful to the donors who tip ActBlue during the contribution process. Without their support, we wouldn’t be able to do our work and remain a steady, nonprofit resource for the entire left. In these tumultuous times, we need to be more ready than ever for the unexpected. We’re proud we can do that work.
What else do you want progressives to know about using ActBlue as a tool for building power in the age of Trump?
Well, 2017 is not the year for staying on the sidelines. Already, over 340,000 new people have signed up for ActBlue Express accounts—which allow them to give with a single click going forward—since January. There are now 3.8 million people with ActBlue Express accounts, and they’re fired up. We make it easy to get involved. And for campaigns and organizations, we make it easy for them to collaborate and build power together. They’re going to have to be nimble and dynamic, adapting to a
changing landscape, and we’re committed to that as well. We can beat the Trump agenda if we all take action. We’re going to be here to support small-dollar donors and organizations across the entire left, every step of the way.