Dems Urge Fundraising Gurus to Put an End to All That Spam

A new letter to officials at ActBlue says changes in policies and features are desperately needed.

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MORE THAN 140 TOP DEMOCRATIC operatives, fundraisers, and ex-campaign staffers are calling for executives at the party’s biggest online donation portal to clean up their operation or risk donor backlash.

In a letter to the leadership of ActBlue, these Democrats said they feared that “questionable” fundraising tactics by unscrupulous groups and operatives were damaging the party’s reputation and hindering its ability to keep voters engaged. The signatories, who say they have collectively raised or donated $1.14 billion on ActBlue since it launched in 2004, called for a number of new features and policies designed to protect donors from exploitation.

Letter to ActBlue

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More than 140 groups and individuals who work in Democratic politics call for major changes from the party's main fundraising portal

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The most significant of those changes would involve ending notorious practices designed to deceive donors into believing that they are giving to official party entities, that they had limited time to donate, or that their donation would be matched by a major contribution from other donors. Such practices have become common among political action committees and even party entities in recent years.

But they became particularly prevalent over the summer as a number of so-called “scam PACs” attempted to take advantage of the groundswell of support for Kamala Harris after she emerged as a presidential candidate. Those groups had generic sounding names that left the impression they were sanctioned party committees. They also sent fundraising solicitations pledging anywhere between 400 percent and 700 percent matching donations—though such matches likely never occurred.

Leaders at those same groups would often take the money they raised through these solicitations and spend it on themselves, often by paying for the services of other groups they ran or controlled. Such self-dealing eventually led ActBlue to boot those scam PACs from its platform this past fall.

But in an effort to prevent copycats, the Democratic operatives, in their letter, offered a novel recommendation: that ActBlue “set a maximum threshold for the percentage of total expenditures entities using ActBlue for donation processing can spend with companies they own or control.”

“Given ActBlue’s pivotal role in Democratic and progressive fundraising, it has a special responsibility to play a leadership role in protecting donors from deceptive practices,” the letter argues. “And while ActBlue has taken some helpful steps in that direction, we believe it can and must do more.”

Among those who signed the letter to ActBlue are consultants, campaign officials, nonprofit staff, technology vendors, donor organizers, and donors who have worked in progressive politics or top campaigns. They include the group MoveOn.org, SwingLeft and New Blue Interactive; top staffers at Movement Voter Project and Indivisible; Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s former digital director, Lauren Miller; Michael Whitney, the former digital director of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign; and Lloyd Cotler, Hillary for America’s SMS director.

Democrats experienced in digital fundraising have feared that the party could forfeit its online money-raising advantages unless its operatives changed practices. In particular, they feared that groups and campaigns were turning off donors by aggressively spamming lists with increasingly misleading or apocalyptic rhetoric.

Though they’ve privately relayed these concerns to individual campaigns and allied groups, these operatives have also increasingly called on ActBlue to do more to police these practices. The online donor portal has, occasionally, done so. But officials there are reluctant to police which groups are engaged in legitimate tactics, which ones are misleading donors, and which ones are true scams.

“ActBlue is a safe and secure platform trusted for decades by valued donors and partners, and we are continuously adapting our platform as technology, fundraising, and donor and campaign needs change,” Megan Hughes, ActBlue’s communications director, said in a statement to The Bulwark.

Some of the changes the Democratic staffers propose are simple workarounds: They propose that ActBlue ensures the fundraising page of any non-official entity soliciting donations for a political organization makes clear that it “is not an official organization of the Democratic Party."

But, in a sign of their experience in the dark arts of online fundraising, the signatories also propose cleverer ways of sniffing out entities that use the portal strictly for self-interest. “Include a small number of fake donor records in CSV exports,” the authors propose, “to catch folks selling or swapping donor contact info acquired through ActBlue donation forms.”

In a statement to The Bulwark, Josh Nelson, CEO of Civic Shout, an ad platform for progressive causes, made clear that the concerns he and others had about ActBlue were distinct from those expressed by House Republicans, who have targeted the company with allegations of donor fraud. Nelson said such attacks were motivated by partisanship. He also praised ActBlue for the steps it had taken to this point to stop scams and protect donors. But more could be done, he added.

“Donors deserve to be able to contribute to campaigns and causes without having to wonder if they’re being taken advantage of,” said Nelson. “But for far too long, ActBlue has largely looked the other way while spammers and scammers sell donors’ contact information and use deceptive tactics to solicit donations. That needs to change.”