On Saturday morning, I announced to the dKos community that I’ve decided to run for public office myself: County Commissioner here in Oakland County, Michigan.
The response from the Daily Kos community has been fantastic, and I greatly appreciate both your words of support as well as the financial contributions some folks have made.
However, several people were curious as to why I’m using a standard retail payment processor instead of an ActBlue account. In addition to being dedicated to Democratic candidates only, AB also provides all sorts of nifty website widgets for “thermometer” goals, multi-candidate campaigns and so forth. Plus, they offer a simple fee structure which cuts out a lot of the confusion.
The only reason I didn’t go with ActBlue is because I thought that, aside from a handful of areas in a few states, they were only available for federal or state candidates, not local (county level) campaigns.
However, dKos member benamery21 pointed out that this is no longer the case. I contacted AB over the weekend, and it turns out that in Oakland County, Michigan, you can use an ActBlue account after all...with a catch.
For federal and some state races, you can just use AB’s flat 3.95% total fee structure; no muss, no fuss.
However, for some states and local races (including my own), you have to also set up a full merchant account, which has it’s own somewhat messy fee structure. The actual total cost ends up being roughly the same (around 4% give or take), but it’s broken out into a combination of percentages and flat per-transaction fees.
Processing/Authorization Fees |
$0.05 per contribution + 0.02% of each gross contribution amount |
ACH Funds Transfer Fee |
$0.50 per ACH transfer to your bank account |
Passthrough Fees |
Credit card transaction fees—these are set by the credit card provider and vary by provider and card type |
ActBlue Service Fee |
1.5% of each gross contribution |
Passthrough fees are usually around 2.5%. Fortunately, there’s no monthly maintenance fee.
By comparison, PayPal (which is what I’m using now) charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, plus a $30/month maintenance fee.
If you raise, say, $10,000 in 1 month via 400 donations of $25 apiece, that amounts to:
- PayPal: $290 + $120 + $30 = $440, or 4.40% total
- ActBlue: $152 + $20 + $250 + $10 = $432, or 4.32% total
...whereas in a federal race, it would be a flat 3.95% via ActBlue, or $395 even.
On the other hand, let’s say that you raise just $5,000 via 500 donations of $10 each. In that case it would be:
- PayPal: $145 + $150 + $30 = $325, or 6.50% (ouch)
- ActBlue: $76 + $25 + $125 + $10 = $236, or 4.72%
- ActBlue (flat): $197.50, or 3.95%
Of course, these will vary depending on the size/number of transactions as well as the exact passthrough fee for that card. The point is that above a certain threshold they’re roughly the same, and anyone in a 6-figure race probably isn’t too concerned about saving a few hundred bucks anyway. ActBlue’s primary advantage is really the web widget stuff.
There’s also Salsa, NGP and others, and the rates vary between them, but I figured other Kossacks might appreciate this news.
In any event, I have therefore decided to set up an AB account after all. It’ll probably be about another week before my own AB account is live, but please don’t let that stop you from making a donation today!!