Benchmarking Online Presidential Donations

There's a lot of news today about how much each presidential candidate has raised so far. Not all the candidates have reported, and the amount of information they each disclose on their sites isn't consistent.

Far from the total amount raised, what's interesting to me is how much was given online.  Hillary raised $26 million - the most of any candidate, and of that $4.2 million was online. In contrast, John Edwards raised less, only $14 million, but $3.3 million was given online. (I can't find any simliar information for Obama or even Biden, at least not yet.)

So, it's Edwards 22% online, vs. Clinton 16% online. It could be that these numbers are skewed by all sorts of manipulation behind the scenes. Or maybe the Edwards web staff is doing a better job in this arena, or Edwards' donors are more web savvy than Clinton's?

What can we glean from this information? Since these donations are highly motivated --  let's just say that somewhere between 15% to 20% is now a good benchmark to aim for.  For arts organizations, where donors are likely to be less motivated, shall we discount this by, say, half? 

Is your organization bringing in 7% - 10% of your donations online? 

Comments

[JD]

Here’s some further reporting on the real math behind the numbers…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/follow-the-real-money_b_44839.html

Of particular interest is that a) Hillary’s 26M might be a matter of interpretation, and b) that 50,000 people contributed to Clinton, while Obama raised money from 80,000…

[Lily]

I would be interested to see the demographics of the people making online donations to these candidates. On the one hand, every person I know who's in their early or mid-twenties looks to do EVERYTHING online first, and only uses another method if it's not possible to do it online. On the other hand, I know no more than two people who would make a donation to a political candidate at all (this generation is too jaded about politics to consider it a worthwhile expense, I think.) Assuming I'm right that most of these donors are in an older demographic, it proves that it's not just the young folk who are taking advantage of the online medium. Also, the twenty-somethings I know consider the arts to be a much more worthy expense in their meager budgets.