Obama’s small donor strategy is really a stealth GOTV strategy
Check out this invitation from Beyonce Knowles that hit my inbox a while back:
Jason —
I usually don’t email you — but I have an amazing invitation I have to share.
Jay and I will be meeting up with President Obama for an evening in NYC sometime soon. And we want you to be there!
Until midnight tonight, if you pitch in $23 or whatever you can, you’ll be automatically entered to be flown out to join us.
I’ve had the honor of meeting President Obama and the First Lady a few times — and believe me — it’s an opportunity you don’t want to miss.
Don’t worry about the airfare and hotel, it’s taken care of. And you can bring a guest.
But the countdown is on — this opportunity ends at midnight:
https://donate.barackobama.com/Meet-Me-in-New-York
Can’t wait to meet you!
Love,
B
Who wouldn’t want to hang with Beyonce, Jay, Barack and Michelle? They should rake in a decent stack of bills with this approach. And yet I don’t think the point of this email is fundraising. Sure, the point is getting someone like me to get off the wallet – but the bigger goal is to get me LITERALLY invested in this campaign and thereby get me to the polls.
It has dawned on someone in the campaign that a person’s likelihood to vote is related to whether or not they’ve given some money (any money) to the campaign. I’m not saying that it is perfectly correlated, but there is a predictable relationship.
If Joe Ordinary with Democratic sympathies is X% likely to vote, then Joe Ordinary who has been moved to donate is X+d% likely to vote. (Insert something more mathy looking if you like. I don’t know scientific notation, but I’m willing to bet that there is a formula, and I’m willing to bet that David Plouffe knows the formula cold.)
That’s why Obama keeps chipping away at $23.00 donations with appeals by everyone from Beyonce to Bill Clinton.
Because all the reporting focuses on the overall funraising take, whi occasional mentions of the % of small donors, I couldn’t find a clear comparison of the absolute numbers of voters each candidate has attracted. (help me out internet) So, let’s look at the candidates donor profiles. Through that lens, Team Obama is trouncing Team RYAN/romney in small donors :
(Romney) is so unloved by the conservative grassroots that he can’t feed off small dollar online donors the way Obama does. While 38 percent of Obama’s haul has come from donors giving less than $200, only 18 percent of Romney’s have.
18% of his support from GOP voters who vastly outnumber the GOP’s wingnut billionaires, and who actually vote isn’t much.
As with any well run robust campaign there are micro and macro goals for the data they collect. So you have your short term goal that you’re collecting the data for (small donor appeal) and then the overall end macro goal (getting x person to vote and volunteer) of what all that aggregate data will take you towards.
But I think you’re over thinking this. Obama has struck gold with his dinner emails and they know it. A one or two thousand dinner plus 10k or so of travel for the attendees probably generates an easy take of a few hundred thousand dollars easy if not a million on the more unique ones, and tons of free media in highly targeted local media markets and constituencies.
Yes I imagine that all of these small donor appeals add even more demographic info to their target models, but at the end of the day I think this is more a money/earned media program then some dr evil data collection/gotv operation. At the end of the day if you are still on Obama’s email list (or any campaign’s) and you haven’t unsubscribed (and you signed up in the first place) by now chances are you’re going to go and vote for the man.
Check Cape Gazette for the de jour John Atkins outrage (its also up on DE Way).