(warning: shameless self-promotion ahead)
Following the great election analysis posts by Stephen Yellin, Newt, and Kos and Jerome, folks here have been asking for
a collection of donation links for the close congressional races.
Two friends and I just launched ActBlue.com, a clearinghouse for Democratic volunteering and donation, which we think will be helpful on this front.
Please check it out, and let us know what you think by commenting below or e-mailing me (brahn-at-actblue-dot-com). What kinds of features would you like to see? Find a campaign or link that we're missing? We'd really appreciate everyone's comments and suggestions.
ActBlue is very much in its infancy, and we've launched this portal while we're building the more complicated stuff. In the coming weeks and months we'll be rolling out lots of new tools to help people find and take advantage of action opportunities, maximize their strategic impact, and recruit their friends and associates to join them. (I've described a few of our plans in the extended copy below.) If you'd like to learn when they're available, you can sign up on the site, or just watch the diaries here for updates.
Here are a few examples of what you'll be able to do on ActBlue in the near future:
- Create your own list of campaigns to feature, with your own commentary, and post it on our website or your own.
- Search, browse, and post to a national calendar of campaign and grassroots-organized events and volunteer opportunities. (Somewhat like Dean's "Get Local" tool, shared across campaigns and Democratic/progressive organizations.) Click to sign up for specific events; no more waiting for campaigns to call you back.
- Easily choose and embed donation/sign-up buttons into blog entries, so readers have an immediate way to take action related to each post. (E.g., if you're writing about the Patriot Act, include a link or button for donations to the ACLU.)
- Set goals, track the volunteering and donations you've recruited, and publicize your groups' accomplishments and most active members both on our website and on your own. (Another Dean analogy: swing the bat for the campaigns and organizations of your choosing—it can all count toward the same goal.)
- More info about each campaign, including latest news and poll results.
- A blog, of course!
So what's the point? We started building the site with the following thoughts in mind:
- It should be really easy for anyone, anywhere, to find out about all the volunteer and donation opportunities available to them without having to separately research each campaign and organization, and to figure out how to maximize the strategic impact of the hours and dollars. (Most people go to Amazon to find their books, not to the websites of each book's publisher.)
- Specific volunteer and donation opportunities (e.g. go door knocking on Saturday, donate to fund this TV ad) are a lot more compelling than a "Sign up and we'll get back to you" request.
- It should be really easy for people to recruit their friends to join them in a fundraising drive or GOTV road trip, without relying on each campaign (esp. the smaller ones) to buy or develop their own
organizing technology.
- Building a big, successful organization like Emily's List is really hard. Persuading people to join and give money will always be challenging, but we should at least make it technically straightforward for people to build their own PAC-like operation, regardless of whether they want to recruit 5 donors or 500,000.
- If you have a website for a club or social group (e.g. a bowling team, a reading group, a bunch of folks you like to hike with) Amazon makes it easy for you to build a list of books related to your club's interest and post it right on your site. You should be able to do the exact same thing for political campaigns: choose a set of campaigns and organizations you feel are worthy of support, and announce their donation and volunteer events on your own website, newsletter, or blog. Your words will be far more compelling to your already loyal friends and readers than any campaign spam.
I'm quite serious when I wrote above that we want your feedback. (We wouldn't mind if you told your friends about the site too!) We'd love to have the collective expertise and insight of the kos community help us turn ActBlue into something really powerful, and help continue the process of opening up politics to the online world.