ActBlue, we need more from you
Urging our infrastructure to be better
A group of 140 organizations, donors, fundraisers, and professionals released a friendly open letter to ActBlue yesterday, urging it to make better use of its central role in Democratic fundraising. The signatories are a heavyweight bunch; they say they’ve raised over $1 billion, or 7% of all funds raised through the platform.1
The letter makes 24 suggestions about how to cure some of Democratic fundraisings’ worst problems, which I’d summarize as:
Simple wins that ActBlue should have done long ago
ActBlue should refuse to serve the worst of the worst: “Scam PACs” that spend most of their money on their own expenses, and organizations that imply they are official party or candidate bodies. For borderline cases, add transparency highlighting the recipients’ unofficial status, or the percentage of funds spent on fundraising and overhead. (ActBlue did expel a few organizations earlier this year that seemed too much like official Kamala Harris entities.)
Protections for donors against spam
Currently, ActBlue seems to do nothing to protect donors against spam. (I asked what they do, and they responded with no comment.) ActBlue didn’t create the spam problem, but it is in a unique position to help fight it. In the short term, there’s a balance between protecting donors from spam and protecting the small-dollar fundraising ecosystem; I’m sympathetic that finding that balance is non-trivial. But the right balance point is definitely more than doing nothing. (In the long term, reducing spam might well increase overall contributions.)
Beyond the letter’s suggestions to make the donor experience less bad, there are ways that ActBlue could affirmatively support donors and fundraisers. Clearest to me are features to support volunteer fundraisers, a group for whom ActBlue offers no support and where good tooling could drive lots of additional fundraising. The pace of new features from ActBlue has been slow at best.
Overall, ActBlue has been a great success story of non-profit movement infrastructure. But the case for non-profit movement infrastructure only works if that infrastructure grows and improves with the movement’s needs. The need for this open letter, and the breadth and specificity of issues it raises, underscore that ActBlue is underplaying its hand.
If ActBlue fails to move quickly on these issues, it raises the question of whether the movement would do better to shift behind one of ActBlue’s growing set of competitors, including (in no particular order):
For more on the open letter, this is a good overview and this is a great discussion with more context and depth.
I wasn’t involved in the drafting but know and respect those who were. I signed the letter.