Or at least, he will be soon. Yes, just a couple of hours after we here at Epolitics.com made fun of his overpriced website/CRM system again, it turns out that Newt Gingrich is soon to launch “‘Newt Hampshire!‘, a social media volunteer platform wholly dedicated to Granite State volunteers” and built on NationBuilder. Good for Newt! He’s actually adopting some solid (and relatively cheap) technology. Best part of the announcement, as quoted by First Read:
Communications director Matt LeDuc said the site’s content and mobilization strategy will “utterly blow your mind.”
Dude, pass the bong. Congrats to NationBuilder for such a high-profile pickup! And congrats to Newt for getting wise about online mobilization, though of course the proof will be in how his campaign actually uses it. Next up: after full deployment (scheduled for Monday), will the campaign roll out a NationBuilder-based voter-organization system nationally?
– cpd
[…] Only hours after this piece was published, the Gingrich campaign announced an upcoming New Hampshire-focused site based on the NationBuilder platform, which is good technology. Perhaps he’s […]
I haven’t scoured Newt’s FEC reports, but I’d be willing to bet that there is a large expense that is buried in the numbers.
Thinking out loud… maybe they purchased the American Solutions email list, or build a custom voter CRM for the early states.
That’s a good point, Stan. So far no evidence I’ve seen, though.
I’m troubled by the adoption of NationBuilder by the right. It’s one thing to have open source solutions used by all, and another for a proprietary service made available to R’s.
Stan, if you mean the expense to put up NewtHampshire.com there were no hidden numbers. and no custom CRM (nationbuilder is its own CRM). I am the consultant who actually put the site up for them. I can’t talk specific numbers, but let’s just say that it hasn’t quite extended to four figures yet. As to lists, let’s just say that Newt has campaigned before, OK? That brings costs way down, and lots of well-attended legacy data is still very, very good for launch day.
Charles, are you saying that NationBuilder should refuse customers from the right and thus refuse their own stockholders the resulting profit, or that NationBuilder should be regulated from doing business with whomever they wish?
Implementing NationBuilder was a breeze and it was fun to work with that great NewtHampshire crew. The implementation was literally done overnight. Staff introduction the next day, launch and mass emails the day after that (and Nationbuilder has it’s own mass email engine with full metrics so you can dump ConstantContact, Socketlabs, or MailChimp).
Herman Cain has also implemented NationBuilder for his volunteer activist web site.
Hi Ron, thanks for weighing in! I think Stan was referring to the amount the Gingrich campaign reported in their FEC filings for his main website/CRM, which was apparently close to 800k.
Here’s a link to the original Epolitics.com piece about that, which in turn links to media reports about it:
http://www.epolitics.com/2011/07/18/newt-gingrichs-800000-tiffany-website-puts-his-campaign-into-debt/