CampaignFoundations.com

Campaign Foundations is pleased to now offer its Basic Campaign Hosting Package including:

1. The Drupal Content Management System to get the technology of the web out of your way as you seek to publish your campaign's content to the voting public. (Drupal powers this site).

2. supporters.cgi, offering the subscribe, donate and volunteer forms linked from the "support the campaign" menu in the right column of our sample site.

3. a mailman listserver to manage email lists and subscriptions in a way that will protect your campaign from having your site used to spam the public. This server comes pre-configured with the six lists we recommend to every campaign, ready for you to customize to your needs.

4. an account on our sql-ledger accounting installation customized to support your campaign treasurer in keeping the books and filing the campaign finance disclosure reports. The link explains how to access and check out our demo installation.

For a $50.00 setup fee and $39.95 a month, you can host your website with administrators who understand the demands of electoral politics and who stand committed to serving your campaign's needs. Link both here to pay your installation fee and here to subscribe now. (Note: all fees payable to our partner, Truffula Networks.)

To see this package in action, take a look at this mock campaign site. We hope you might also see how easy these tools are to use by reading these instructions for launching your web site in two hours.

When you subscribe to our hosting service, during installation, we will send you a copy of our stock supporters.copy and supporters.conf files for you to customize for your campaign. Or you may download them at: supporters.copy and supporters.conf. Please edit these with a plain text editor and return these files for installation.

The format is critical. If we break the format, this will break your donate, subscribe and volunteer forms.

The donation / subscription / volunteer forms provided by supporters.cgi are backed by a referral engine designed to make the data you collect on your website immediately available in usable forms by the people who need it.

supporters.cgi was written to build the Green Party and its lists in ways that will survive the close of the polls on election day. Campaigns come and go. But our county and state Parties survive to field the next candidate, to prosecute the next campaign. So that your campaign can make the maximum possible long range impact on your Party's ability to do this more effectively next cycle, we provide a means for you to invite your supporters to subscribe to your Party lists while you invite them to subscribe to your own campaign lists.

If you don't already have a merchant account, and you don't anticipate doing the volume of donations which would make acquiring one cost-effective, you can still use CampaignFoundation.com's web forms to pipe online contributions directly into your campaign account by using paypal to process the credit and debit card contributions you raise on your site.

Create and log in to your paypal account.

Select the Merchant Tools tab at the top of the page.

Get all the features, support, control and peace of mind provided by our Basic Campaign Hosting Package, PLUS the Constituent Relationship Management tools needed to manage, engage and build a membership, or the support base of an issue campaign or your support among the voters of your district for an electoral campaign.

For a $100.00 set up fee and $49.95 per month, you get CiviCRM Constituent Relationship Management application, the Drupal Content Management System, supporters.cgi (providing donation forms, volunteer forms and subscription forms), an instance of Mailman maillist server at your domain name and an account on our SQL-Ledger installation to provide your campaign treasurer or organization's bookkeeper with secured access to a double entry GAAP compliant accounting package.

Your web site has to be kept up to date, but that's only a start. Make sure you use your email lists as well to stay in touch with your supporters and the public.

Our Basic Hosting Package comes packaged with eight lists preconfigured for your campaign. Our subscription forms are ready to link from your site so you can feed website visitors directly into your lists as subscribers.

Engaging your campaign supporters on line means you must both

(1) be careful not to abuse their consent to send your materials to their inbox; and

(2) that you must honor their intent to subscribe by not ignoring them.

Use this medium to send traffic appropriate in content and volume to your subscriber's expectations and it will be reflected in your real world campaign as increased contributions, volunteer engagement and turn-out at events and at the polls.

The Cobb-LaMarche '04 Campaign prioritized a donation form in its web development plan and the donation form became the first deliverable of supporters.cgi. Our supporters tool has expanded greatly since that version 0.10 launch, but it remains the heart of our offerings. That code served as the conduit for nearly a third of a million dollars of funds contributed that year to fund the Ohio Recount effort.

No campaign can carry its message to the voters without the funds to pay the printer, keep the phones on, pay for the radio time and reimburse volunteers for their gas costs. A campaign can't be very visible on election day if someone isn't ferrying meals and fluids to the folks waving signs at the polls. We know you need the money. Somebody's going to have to pay for all of that.

We're here to handle creating a foundation for your fundraising efforts. Your campaign's treasurer will open an account. We will then help them get the forms we offer wired to that account so that you can accept credit cards as well as checks and cash and in-kind donations.

The votecobb.org domain now redirects to http://www.iwantmyvote.com/. The template formerly hosted there which wrapped these forms are no more. But the form is still there, with the copy configured for the Cobb campaign, at:

http://web.greens.org/c/cobb/supporters.cgi

http://web.greens.org/c/cobb/supporters.cgi?function=subscribe

http://web.greens.org/c/cobb/supporters.cgi?function=volunteer&process=1

Since the 2004 Presidential race, supporters.cgi has been rewritten so that we can easily customize it to your needs. You write the copy, you frame the message, we'll wrap it and your website's theme around the forms and you'll be ready for business in only a day or two, depending on your choices for credit card processing.

Dialing for dollars may not be our most favorite chore on the campaign trail. But it gets a little easier when you see the instant feedback afforded by on-line forms accepting your supporters' credit and debit card enabled contributions in real time.