Let's spend some time looking at our ActBlue totals, donors, and contributions. I'll be breaking these apart for 2nd Quarter data compared to that for the lifetime of ActBlue.
Total Contributions
Life: $24,790,988.32
Q2: $3,460,609.75
The 2nd Quarter of 2007 represents 14% of all contributions made on ActBlue over the least 3 years. To put this in perspective, it took ActBlue over five fundraising quarters in '05-'06 to raise the same amount as was raised in this past quarter alone. By November of 2006, ActBlue had raised a lifetime total of about $17 million with 40% of that coming in during the last 6 weeks of the campaign cycle. When you consider that Q2 2007 is already outpacing Q2 2005 by a factor of 10 and that this is a Presidential Cycle...well, you get the picture. It's one of the reasons why investment in ActBlue is so critical- we'll need to expand our six member staff and move out of our 600 sq ft office sooner than later.
Total Number of donors
Life: 217,998
Q2: 28,925
The 2nd Quarter of 2007 represents 13.2% of the number of individual donors on ActBlue.
Average contribution size to all entities
Life: $60.38
Q2: $99.65
The 2nd Quarter of 2007 represents a 65% increase in the average contribution size to all candidates, committees, and organizations when compared to the ActBlue lifetime average. This is explained by the activity of campaigns. Monies raised earlier in an election cycle tend to be weighted more heavily by maxed out or large donors. In campaigns, these larger donations are often gathered to generate early momentum and viability as candidates reach out to their personal friends and most steadfast supporters. As individual fundraisers and grassroots communities grow we expect this average contribution size to naturally fall later in the cycle.
Average contribution size made to ActBlue Pages
Life: $112.28
Q2: $119.64
The 2nd Quarter of 2007 represents only a 6.5% increase in the average contribution size made to ActBlue fundraising pages. Overall, contributions to pages are higher than those to entities since pages often contain multiple candidates. The slight increase is within the normal parameters, although the use by some campaigns of single, one-candidates ActBlue pages to collect contributions for their sites has some effect in increasing the average. Compared to the rather large increase in average contributions to "entities" explained above, we can see that pages are less effected by the campaign cycle since they are more grassroots in nature.
Median contribution
Life: $50.00
Q2: $45.00
The 2nd Quarter of 2007 represents a 10% decline in the median contribution size. While the average contribution size has increased, the decline in the median contribution is evidence that small dollar grassroots contributions are healthy and abundant on ActBlue. This means a cluster of high dollar donations is responsible for bringing up the site's average for the quarter rather than a more general trend of larger contribution sizes.
Join us again tomorrow when we explore the topic of top candidates on the ActBlue Blog.