October 15, 2012

WATCH: Tim Murphy Talks Political Data-Mining on Democracy Now!

I was on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman on Monday morning talking about the Obama and Romney campaign’s use of online and offline data-mining to learn more about you (and then ask you for money). Watch:

You can read my profile of Harper Reed, Obama for America’s Chief Technology Officer, here. And here’s the how-to guide on how the Obama campaign learns more (and more, and more) about you.

On Sunday, the New York Times covered a lot of familiar ground in a big piece on campaigns’ use of consumer data—they’ve been using these databases since at least 2002—but one interesting nugget in there is the discussion of online shaming. Advocacy groups and campaigns have already experimented in sending out passive-aggressive mailers to voters (citing things like voting history) in order to coerce them into showing up at the polls or volunteering. Now they’re branching out into the Internet as well, and using your own circles of friends to do it. (Here’s a good example of this kind of pitch, from the Obama campaign, providing an online tracking number and gently asking you to correct the record if it’s really true that you haven’t given any money.)

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

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