RK ARCHIVE - ActBlue Helping County Parties

Since 2004, ActBlue has helped Democrats raise over $22 million in online contributions. We are a Political Action Committee, not a business, so our motivation is getting Democrats elected instead of padding profit margins. We know how much of a hassle accepting credit card donations on the Internet can be, and we want to help.

One of the areas that ActBlue can help in is with your local County Democratic Party.

If your local county party or committee is in one of the 22 states where ActBlue is already active (minus some clean-elections states like Arizona), you can have all the ActBlue fundraising tools utilized by top tier House and Senate campaigns at the disposal of your county party. Several county parties are already using those tools to achieve success!

In Oregon, the Yamhill County Democratic Party uses ActBlue to accept monthly recurring contributions:

Instead of soliciting your membership for a one-time donation, recurring contributions allow you to ask them for $10 a month (or more) for the next year. This helps you budget and helps your members by spreading out their contribution over an entire year.

The San Diego County Democratic Party used ActBlue to accept RSVPs and payments for their annual fundraising dinner:

Using ActBlue for event management allows you to see your rsvps in real time (no waiting for a check in the mail!). Online invitations help circulate event details while collecting contributions. Contributor data in spreadsheet form provides you with an instant guest list and useful template for nametags and thank you notes.

The Democratic Party of San Fernando Valley used ActBlue earlier this year to collect registration costs for their General Assembly meeting.

So how cost effective is this for local parties? There is no setup fee, no maintenance fee, no check fee, no check re-issue fee and no customer service fees. We deduct a processing fee of around 3.95% which covers what we are charged by our credit card processor. This fee comes out of your contributions so there are never any bills to pay.

Every Monday we mail checks to all campaigns and committees that received contributions through ActBlue during the past week. All of the information about the individual contributors is available online and can be imported to your existing campaign finance software.

You can see that there are a number of ways that County Parties can use ActBlue. In the most basic sense, parties can use ActBlue to process their general donations and ease their reporting burden. At any time they can take advantage of these more creative and advanced options to enhance their fundraising, none of which even requires a county party to have a website!

This is just another way we are hoping to make ActBlue useful to you in building a more Democratic America. Please contact us at info@actblue.com to discuss how we can help your county party. We'll be happy to get you started!

Comments

Is there anything you guys won't do? (pitin - 5/31/2007 6:31:07 PM)

This is a great tool for County parties as they may now have their sustainers simply pledge online and have a recurring contribution happen automatically instead of having to hunt them 30 days.

Brilliant.

County Chair's and Board Members are you reading this?

Recurring is awesome (KTatActBlue - 5/31/2007 6:48:01 PM)

We've heard stories of some places doing it by hand from paper cards each month! There is *no* reason to do that. And this is there for counties that don't even have websites which should be helpful to ones that survive off of their county listserv. Feel free to have any of them get in touch with us.

too bad... (elevandoski - 6/1/2007 3:02:56 PM)

Soapbox doesn't have an "Email to a Friend" feature on this post. I'd send it to my local committee. I guess I'll have to do it the old fashioned way. ;)

yeah, what's up with that :) (KTatActBlue - 6/1/2007 5:31:47 PM)

Feel free to pass it along or have them get in touch with us if anyone needs help. In Virginia we need to load in a lot of the county jurisdictions but that's rather simple stuff.

ActBlue rocks (Shawn - 6/1/2007 4:55:53 PM)

After a very positive experimental experience during 2006, I set up this page to take contributions during 2007:

http://www.actblue.c...