Our Fundraising So Far

Lessig — 2014-08-05

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Our Fundraising So Far

On May 1, we launched a two stage funding campaign to raise the money the Mayday PAC would need for the 2014 election cycle. (You can read our plan here). Each stage had two steps: first, a contingent funding campaign, similar to Kickstarter, in which pledges would be collected only if the target was met; second, a match, by one or more donors, in the amount of the target met.

In the first stage, the target was $1 million in 30 days. We met that goal in 13 days. We then secured a match for that $1 million from seven people — Chris Anderson, Brad Burnham, Reid Hoffman, Vin Ryan, Peter Thiel, and Fred and Joanne Wilson. At the time the match was announced, we also announced a supplemental pledge by David Milner to raise or give $100,000 to launch the second stage of our campaign.

The target for that second stage was $5 million in 30 days, or by July 4. Once again, we asked supporters to make contingent pledges to meet the goal. Once again, had we not received commitments for that goal by July 4, we would have been obligated to return the pledges we had received.

At 9:30 PM ET, we crossed $5 million in commitments. I am currently working to finalize the commitments to match that $5 million.

Throughout this campaign, we have evolved the platform for meeting the contingent funding commitments.

In the $1 million campaign, though we took credit card information when the pledge was made, we only charged the credit cards when the $1 million target was met. That proved unworkable for the second round — by the time we charged their card, too many had forgotten about the pledge, forcing us to field many calls by supporters uncertain about the charge on their credit card account. (Following Craig Newmark’s model, I was the volunteer who took most of those “customer support” calls. That was an experience, as my mother would have said, that was “good for [my] development.”) We changed the model in the second round, collecting the pledge in advance, with the understanding that we’d return the pledge if we didn’t meet our goal.

Likewise, early on, some supporters asked us to enable non-contingent giving. We added that option, at first by partnering with Democracy.com, and then by adding support for Paypal contributions.

We added the ability to give money by check, and after clarity from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), to contribute with Bitcoins.

And finally, after the initial $1 million campaign, when a number of larger contributors indicated their eagerness to participate in the second contingent funding stage of our campaign, we began to accept larger commitments from these potential contributors off-line, rather than forcing those pledges through the online credit card servicing system (and, truth be told, paying the credit card fees for the pledge!). Once the $5 million target was met, we began collecting on these pledged contingent funding commitments.

This category of “pledged contingent funding commitments” is the source of the puzzlement remarked upon by Peter Olsen-Phillips at the Sunlight Foundation, when he wondered how it was possible for us to raise “$3.7 million in 4 days” We didn’t raise $3.7 million in 4 days; our thermometer indicated that on the day we made our FEC filing, we had raised just about half of our goal — $2.4 million. From 30 June through 2 August, we raised an additional $2.6 million. The difference is that the FEC data reflects cash received. The FEC report therefore did not include the pledged contingent funding commitments.

Our Transparency Pledge

On July 23, I announced a strategy to increase the timeliness of Mayday.US’s reporting of donations. As I said then,

On August 5th, we will release a data file with all contributions to MAYDAY through July 31st. For contributors who we’ve determined have given less than $200, we will anonymize their names. But for the balance of our contributors, we will release the same data we would be releasing to the FEC, removing only address data (to avoid bulk mail spam). In addition, for all anonymized contributors, we will release the preference about whether their contribution should be used to support Democrats or Republicans only. For the balance, we will release aggregate data about the choices made.

Today’s posting delivers on that promise — though with one important snag.

After I made my pledge, a volunteer raised the question whether the promise I had made — to release the names of everyone who had given $200 or more on our site — was consistent with our privacy policy. We obviously need to report the names of people who make aggregate contributions greater than $200 to the FEC. But in crafting our privacy policy to give our community the assurance that we weren’t in the list-building business, we had promised that we would only make that information available to the FEC. The FEC of course makes the data available to the public, on their website, but “on their website” is different from “on our website.”

Or so the volunteer wondered.

Our lawyers agree with the volunteer. So we have had modified our posting today, and as of August 2, we have modified our privacy policy to enable us to provide what I originally promised going forward.

Today, we are releasing all contributions from our launch through the change in our privacy policy (May 1 through August 2). But for contributions under $10,000, the contributor has been anonymized. For contributions of $10k and above, we had announced a commitment to release the names of all “large” contributors on our site. That data can be found here. And for those who gave between $200 and $10k, their names will be made public at the FEC’s site. But our privacy commitment limited the ability for us to release those names. That commitment is not something I had the power unilaterally to change.

Our release today provides a great deal of data for people to study and analyze. In one sense, it provides more data than I had originally promised (since we are providing the party-preference choices of the anonymized contributors). But I am sorry to have missed the subtlety within our own privacy policy that made it impossible for us to provide the data that the FEC will be permitted to provide. (We will post an update when the FEC has our data, and a link to the FEC report.)

Going forward, given the change in our privacy policy, we will only anonymize data for contributors giving $200 or less. And we will release those data every two weeks until the election.

What all this shows

As of midnight (Eastern time), August 2, the Mayday PAC had received $7,821,463 in contributions. $2 million of that was raised in the first campaign. $5,821,463 has been raised in the second campaign so far.

Of the $5,821k raised, $750k was raised in three very large chunks ($250k after the July 4 deadline, and two separate contingent commitments of $250k before the July 4th deadline). Of the remaining $5,071,463, $2,645,438 was raised in contributions of $10k or more. The balance of $2,426,025 was raised in contributions under $10k.

The total number of all contributions was 60,075. The average of all contributions was $130.20 (median: $25, mode: $25). The total number of contributions under $10k was 60,000 . The average of those was $73.77 (median: $25, mode: $25).

25% of contributions were earmarked to support Democratic candidates only. 0.6% were earmarked for Republican candidates only. And 74% was given without any restriction for either candidate.

The release we are making today of all the donation records (aggregated per donor, but anonymized for contributions of $10k or less) will enable researchers to study the pattern and nature of the contributions we received. With those data now available, I am hopeful that a wide range of analyses will be produced.

I am incredibly proud of the community of supporters that we have been able to attract to this “abstract” (as the skeptics call it) campaign to change fundamentally the way campaigns are funded. As I’ve said from the start, this movement will require support from large and small donors alike. We have 60,000 small donors, and 75 large donors, and together they have built the largest campaign chest for reform ever.

But there is still a great deal of work to do. As I have said from the start, we will only succeed in this campaign if we can make the campaign cross-partisan. If the party-indications are indicative, we have not yet attracted enough Republican support. And of course, we always need more small contributors — though as I argue in this (really too long) piece in Medium, cross-magnitude diversity is important as well. Left and Right, and large and small: all sides need to work not to our common end, but against our common enemy — a system of funding campaigns that corrupts our government.

Finally, there is still the final $5M in matching fund contributions to complete. I expect this amount will come from a small number of larger contributions. Stay tuned for that announcement (once we’ve completed the match, we will announce the commitments immediately). And stay tuned as well for the updated contribution reports, which will now be produced every two weeks.

Thank you to everyone who has made this possible so far. On to the campaigns!

-Lessig

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Our Privacy Policy

Our Fundraising So Far

Lessig — 2014-08-05