Quoth Brian Holtz: > ) http://www.campaignsitebuilder.com/ ( > > Nice. That seems to have more features, and a lower price, than > campaignhighway.com. I'm especially intrigued by the "bulk email" feature, > and wonder if it can send to the thousands of email addresses in a > candidate's voter registration tables. Pam, can you tell if it will allow > sending to arbitrary lists of email addresses, or do they have to be > addresses that opted in via their site?
It's been awhile since I used CampaignSiteBuilder, but I wasn't impressed. My recollection is that their bulk email feature was useable ONLY with opt-in addresses processed through the CSB site. I'm pretty sure that's also the case with campaign donations, etc., i.e. you can't set up donations to a campaign PayPal account, or through Aristotle or whatever, it flows through their mechanism at their commission rate and such. Last time I noticed, CSB was $25 a month. If we assume that a campaign web site is going to be up for at least six months (general election in November, and I'm pretty sure most state filings for that election have closed by May), that's $125. You can get reasonably good standard web hosting, depending on bandwidth expectations, for $5-10 a month. It's a fair bet that you can find someone to design a unique site template for you for $100 or less so that your site doesn't look like one of the x number of available CSB templates. There are numerous free or cheap integrated (PHP-List comes with a lot of hosting packages) or third party (Yahoo or Google groups, etc.) options for building a campaign email newsletter list. There are numerous easily-plugged-in contribution processing options whose commissions are no worse, and probably better, than CSB's, and which can be used elsewhere than on your CSB site. That last thing, I think, is important. CSB creates kind of a bottleneck: If you use them, you're using their stuff, so unless you want to duplicate your efforts using other vendors of services, you have to funnel everything INTO the campaign site, and you don't capture contributions, data etc. from people who don't want to go there. With MySpace, Facebook, etc. playing a bigger and bigger role, it's better to be able to capture that stuff from anywhere using standardized tools than to have to find a way to push them to another site to do so. Based on the number of candidates California is likely to run, it might actually be worth setting up a dedicated party server, offering candidates free or cheap hosting, and having a staff member or volunteer set up a fairly standard "Libertarian candidate template" using DruPal or some other reasonably intuitive (once set up) Content Management System, then be available to help candidates customize as needed. The California LP has an advantage in being large -- if you run 100 candidates, and they all use CampaignSiteBuilder, that's $2500 a month. I suspect that the CA-LP could do something a lot better for a lot less (offhand, $10k or less for a six-month project), even if it required a part-time staffer on payroll to run it ... and I likewise suspect that dedicated funds for doing it could be easily raised. Or just charge: At 100 candidates, $10k would come to $100 per candidate, a 33% savings from what they'd pay at CampaignSiteBuilder for six months. Regards, Tom Knapp
