Obama Raised Half a Billion Online

[ClarkUSA]

Washington Post reports on some great news about Team O's grassroots/netroots-powered fundraising and how they/we did it. Meet the guys who built the Obama online machine:

Barack Obama raised half a billion dollars online in his 21-month campaign for the White House... In an exclusive interview with The Post, members of the vaunted Triple O, Obama's online operation, broke down the numbers: 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once... In September, his single biggest month of fundraising, Obama amassed more than 65 percent of his record-shattering haul -- $100 million of the $150 million -- from online donations, aides said. After Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin dismissed the value of community organizing in her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Sept. 3 -- "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities," she said to applause -- Obama raised $10 million within 24 hours... Here are some more specific figures from the campaign:

Obama's e-mail list contains upwards of 13 million addresses... (Four years ago, Sen. John F. Kerry had 3 million e-addresses on his list; former Vermont governor Howard Dean had 600,000.).. A million people signed up for Obama's text-messaging program. On the night Obama accepted the Democratic nomination at Invesco Field in Denver, more than 30,000 phones among the crowd of 75,000 were used to text in to join the program... On MyBarackObama.com, or MyBO, Obama's own socnet, 2 million profiles were created. In addition, 200,000 offline events were planned, about 400,000 blog posts were written and more than 35,000 volunteer groups were created -- at least 1,000 of them on Feb. 10, 2007, the day Obama announced his candidacy. Some 3 million calls were made in the final four days of the campaign using MyBO's virtual phone-banking platform. On their own MyBO fundraising pages, 70,000 people raised $30 million. The campaign even set up a grassroots finance committee that was inspired by the national finance committee's high-dollar bundlers. In the grassroots committee, though, supporters were trained to collect small-dollar donations from their friends, relatives and co-workers.

Obama has 5 million supporters in other socnets. He maintained a profile in more than 15 online communities, including BlackPlanet, a MySpace for African Americans, and Eons, a Facebook for baby boomers. On Facebook, where about 3.2 million signed up as his supporters, a group called Students for Barack Obama was created in July 2007... No other major campaign this cycle put technology and the Internet at the heart of its operation at this scale. Inevitably, the scope of the operation was the envy, if not outright obsession, of other campaigns. "It doesn't matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat, if you care about how technology has changed campaigning, you watched what they were doing," said Mindy Finn, who worked on President Bush's eCampaign team in 2004 and supervised Mitt Romney's online strategy. Rospars reported directly to David Plouffe, the campaign manager -- most Internet directors did not have that kind of relationship -- and his work was promoted by Julius Genachowski, a longtime friend of Obama who served as the campaign's chief technology advisor.

Genachowski now sits on Obama's transition team and is rumored to be the top candidate for the post of national chief technology officer, a forthcoming Cabinet-level position in the Obama White House... Genachowski, whom Triple O staffers such as Scott Goodstein, 34, refer to as "the godfather," set up the multifaceted digital operation. In early 2007, Genachowski brought in Rospars, who co-founded his own online consulting firm and worked on Dean's online-fueled campaign, to be the campaign's new media director, and Kevin Malover, a veteran of online travel agency Orbitz, to be chief technology officer. In an interview in May 2007, Genachowski told us: "We may be the only campaign with a full-time chief technology officer." While Rospars was in charge of the entire political operation, Malover helped build software and took care of integrating data and voter files...Chris Hughes, 24, one of the youngest members of Triple O, told The Post: "What we've learned from this campaign is that there's huge potential for people that haven't been involved in politics to discover that, yes, this is something that impacts me. Even before I joined the campaign, the fundamental premise was to help put the political process into people's own hands. That was the value from the start of the campaign, that was the value at the end of the campaign, and it's not going away."

:fistbump:

[Jennicut]

1. Obama is way into his technology, it really helped him

Shout out to Dr. Dean for starting the internet-fundraising revolution.

[kentuck]

2. Good thing we don't have the Fairness Doctrine, huh?

:-)

[Triana]

3. Yet another reason to be impressed with Obama and his campaign...

...I feel assured he will run the country with the same impressive skill and a similarly impressive team in his administration.

[FrenchieCat]

4. Barack Obama.....

the smartest motherf*cker in the room.

That is all.