The $500 Million Man

by Todd Beeton [courtesy of MyDD]

Over the course of his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama raised more than $500 million online. The Washington Post breaks it down:

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. [...]

Obama also raised millions from traditional campaign bundlers -- rich, well-connected fundraisers -- but the bulk of the more than $600 million that Obama raised throughout the campaign was through the Internet, aides said. (Some of those bundlers, of course, also arranged for donations to be made online, so there is some overlap.)

Over the course of the primary, as I went to Obama event after Obama event, I witnessed in awe the way the campaign harnessed their crowds. Obama's rallies were not simply about communicating a message in a speech; through these offline events they were creating their online army. For example, in Oakland, every person admitted (for free) into the rally were asked to fill out a "ticket" that included their e-mail address; in Santa Barbara, the campaign recruited community level volunteers and organizers; and in L.A., as in South Carolina, Team Obama collected cell phone numbers and had thousands of people perform impromptu phone banks. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. And you know that, as revolutionary and unique as these methods were, every presidential campaign moving forward is going to be using these techniques.

Some more statistics:

• 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.)

• Over the course of the campaign, aides sent more than 7,000 different messages. In total, more than 1 billion e-mails landed in inboxes.

• A million people signed up for Obama's text-messaging program. Supporters on average received five to 20 text messages per month, depending on where they lived.

• 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

• 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.