As the 2012 election campaign heats up, candidates and political strategists are being confronted by a timeless question – where will the money come from?
According to one recent article in the Huffington Post, more and more campaigns are answering that question with “mobile.” The article writes,
Developing easy ways for people to donate to political campaigns using their cellphones has been the holy grail of campaign finance teams for several cycles now.It makes perfect sense. Not only does everybody have a cell phone, but more and more people are accessing email and the web straight from their phones. Furthermore, an SMS campaign can send a targeted link that takes its recipient directly to an auto-populated web page. The article quotes cites our CEO, Jed Alpert, and Mobile Commons’ work with mobile donations:
[Jed] said that the strongest response rates came when the campaign would …sen[d] a text message that linked to a website that triggered an “auto-populated” credit card form.One thing political campaigns can’t count on yet is asking people to text to donate. Text-to-donate campaigns have been extremely effective in disaster relief situations, and for certain of our clients, like This American Life. For now, however, the FEC has decided that text-to-donate programs violate campaign finance rules about disclosure.
That ruling, however, is under attack. California recently approved text-to-donate campaigns. Ann Ravel, Chairwoman of California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, said,
“The purpose of the FPPC is to restore confidence in the government process…. One of the ways we have done it in the past is to regulate the corrupting influence of money. This is the other side of that coin, which is allowing lots of individual, small contributors to contribute because it would have the impact of balancing out the influence of big money.”While it remains to be seen if the carriers will allow those donations to be processed, this is a step in the right direction. At Mobile Commons, we strongly believe that allowing citizens to text in small donations, of just $5 or $10, to their preferred candidates opens up the political process. As Ravel suggests, texting to donate gives small contributors, acting en masse, the power to have an impact on national campaigns.
Regardless of whether or not those rules are approved, Mobile Commons remains committed to making it easy for citizens to donate straight from their mobile phones.