Kerry Campaign Dumps Cash on Web
Louise Witt
Wired
Oct 5, 2004
The presidential campaigns and the major political parties have mostly ignored online advertising as a way to reach voters in the 2004 election, according to a report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That is, until now.
After Thursday night's debate between Sen. John Kerry and President George W. Bush, the Democratic National Committee bought roughly $400,000 worth of ads on 50 sites, including USA Today, The Washington Post, MSNBC, The New York Times, Salon.com, Weather.com, ESPN.com and Movieline.com. The DNC also bought ads on local news sites. In a few days, it almost doubled its entire online advertising budget for the previous eight months.
And the DNC isn't done. The party plans to have another online media blitz after Tuesday night's debate between the vice presidential candidates, Sen. John Edwards and Vice President Dick Cheney, said Jano Cabrera, the DNC's communications director.
The DNC's web effort last week capitalized on the number of Americans who watched the 90-minute debate between Kerry and Bush. According to Nielsen Media Research, the 90-minute debate drew in more than 62 million viewers. In contrast, only about 24 million tuned in to listen to Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention this summer.
"Viewership for the debate is akin to the finale of Friends, in terms of raw numbers of viewers," said Cabrera. "With that level of interest, we knew that a number of people would rush to the internet to find out more information about John Kerry and George W. Bush and we wanted to have a strong online presence."
Doug Kelly, the DNC's director of technology, put it more bluntly: "The strategy was to stop George W. Bush and the Republicans from stealing the post-debate spin like they did in 2000. They dominated the post-debate spin then and we were not going to let that happen again."
After Al Gore's first debate with Bush, advisers to the Democratic candidate thought he had won. But Gore was considered the loser hours later, due to the perception that his audible sighs made him seem condescending. "The Republicans ran a very good operation in the past," Kelly said. "They pointed out one nugget in Gore's performance and drove the media to that nugget."
This time, the DNC ads, which ran Thursday through Sunday, directed supporters to participate in online polls about the debate, such as those being conducted on the Los Angeles Times' site and on CNN.com, as well as to go to the media contact page on the DNC site. Once there, supporters were told how to write a letter to the editor of their local newspaper or how to call in to a local radio show.
Kelly said the DNC site had so many visitors that it deactivated the visitor log feature. "It takes up so much bandwidth, so we turned it off," he said. Kelly said Kerry's site, JohnKerry.com, had three times the number of visitors the night of the debate that it had the night of his convention speech. Twenty thousand signed up to be volunteers.
The DNC also raised $4 million the day of the debate, said Nancy Eiring, director of the DNC's grass-roots fund-raising efforts. Between 9 p.m. and midnight, she said, the party brought in $10,000 a minute. Eiring added that the DNC ads on national websites had a staggeringly high click-through rate of 5 percent.
Until the debates, neither the parties nor the campaigns used the internet to promote their candidates to any great extent, said Michael Cornfield, a senior research consultant at the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the author of the report. Instead, they used the web to raise money, organize volunteers and encourage supporters to register to vote.
"This teaches us that online advertising, like online fund raising, works best if it exploits the moment and takes advantage of a large audience created by other means," Cornfield said. "They use the other media to build an audience for them and then they attempt to convert that interest into an opportunity for persuasion and mobilization."
So far, Cornfield hasn't noticed that the Republican National Committee or the Bush campaign has stepped up their online advertising. Calls to both groups for comment were not returned. But as Election Day nears, Cornfield said he expects both campaigns to buy more online ads. "It's all fast and furious now," he said.
In his report, Cornfield found that from January through August, the parties and the campaigns spent more than $100 on TV ads for every dollar they spent on online ads.
For the first eight months of 2004, the Kerry campaign outspent the Bush campaign by a 3-to-1 margin on online ads, the report said. Kerry's campaign spent $1.3 million, while Bush's laid out $419,000. However, the Republican Party was more lavish with its internet-advertising buys. Through the end of August, the RNC spent $487,000 on online ads compared to the DNC's $257,000.
With its massive online media buy after the first debate, the Democratic Party surpassed the Republicans.
"After the first debate, the ads running on NationalJournal.com, for example, were another way for the Democrats to spread their message that Kerry had won the debates among opinion leaders and decision makers," said Brian Reich, director of Mindshare Interactive Campaigns' Boston operations and editor of Campaign Web Review. "In a close election like we have this year, a slight tactical advantage like this one could shift the balance of the race in the Democrats' direction."
Cornfield was surprised that the presidential campaigns, the parties and advocacy groups didn't have more extensive online ad campaigns, especially since web advertising is becoming increasingly popular. In his report, he wrote that ad spending on the internet is growing faster than in any other media. Online advertising revenue is expected to reach $8 billion by the end of 2004.
"Yet, for all the online experimentation the campaigns have attempted this year, they have not ventured aggressively into online advertising," he wrote. "This is surprising because online ads can reach new, undecided and wavering voters in the demographic and geographic niches where they are thought to reside."
In the last days of the campaign, that's changing. "We will do anything we can to get the grass roots fired up and active," said DNC's Kelly. "We rule out nothing."
Plus Three Brings Premier Voter File System to the Web
Posted on 09/27/2004 @ 10:40 AM
LEVERAGE Enhances Constituent Relationships Through Dynamic Database Functionality and Precision Targeting
Plus Three, LP ("Plus Three" or the "Company"), a strategic marketing and technology agency serving major US political organizations and world-class non-profit institutions, today announced that Blaemire Communications, a leading political data services company, is using the company's technology to develop and manage LEVERAGE, the premier Web-based voter file system. The secure database allows users to enhance their relationships with constituents through precise targeting and communications efforts.
Thirteen states, including Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, West Virginia and Wyoming are currently running LEVERAGE to drive voter contact and get-out-the-vote efforts. Plus Three has worked with Blaemire to build systems, manage and/or expand LEVERAGE in all of these states. Blaemire also works with progressive organizations who need to mobilize volunteers around the country.
"Organizing an army of volunteers and staffers to ensure each and every one of our constituents is contacted and motivated to vote in November, can be a daunting task," said Dennis L. White, Ohio Democratic Party Chair. "Thankfully, LEVERAGE has greatly simplified the job of creating task lists and efficiently deploying volunteers. In addition, LEVERAGE is easy enough to use that volunteers and staff in the field are able to quickly enter constituent or voter updates back into the LEVERAGE system via remote entry, greatly increasing the effectiveness of all of our voter-drive efforts."
Built by Plus Three, LEVERAGE is an open-source, Web-based voter file system that allows users to interact with state wide data files enhanced with geographic, demographic and electoral information, improving the ability of users to build relationships with constituents. Additional information gathered from offline sources such as canvassing and poll results is easily integrated into LEVERAGE from authorized workstations and remotely via palm pilot synchronizations. To prevent unauthorized viewing of proprietary data, each user of LEVERAGE is assigned a permission level governing to which data that user has access.
"Plus Three's technical know-how and expertise working with large online databases, made up of hundreds of millions of records and billions of actions combined with their experience with political parties and progressive organizations made them the perfect choice to build LEVERAGE," said Robert Blaemire, president and founder of Blaemire Communications. "With LEVERAGE, organizations and state parties are able to combine proven off line techniques with the power and flexibility of the Internet. This combination greatly enhances the effectiveness of any organization to communicate with its constituents and voters in powerful and meaningful ways, and, most importantly, elect candidates to office."
LEVERAGE is a particularly critical system in this election where turnout and voting habits in a few key swing states will likely alter the outcome. LEVERAGE allows users to access and generate queries for highly targeted lists enabling on-the-ground organizers to target specific groups with specific appeals that will enhance the likelihood of them casting a vote. In addition, tools critical to the election process, such as walk lists, call sheets, and mailing lists are easily generated in LEVERAGE while completely preserving voter confidentiality.
Plus Three is the leading provider of online marketing and fundraising services for progressive causes. Since its inception, the Company has been tapped by leading Democratic organization and candidates to support their election efforts with highly targeted online campaigns. Online fundraising took on added significance during the recent Democratic Party primary, as candidates capitalized on the medium to build widespread communities and attract donations. Evidence of the increasing vitality and importance of the Web as a campaign fundraising tool — during the first half of 2004, Plus Three has raised over $80 million online through systems it has developed since the start of 2004 in support of progressive campaigns and causes.
"To prepare for this year's November elections, both parties are focusing their efforts on driving their respective bases to the polls," said Plus Three founder and president, Juan Proaño. "Technology tools, such as LEVERAGE, that increase the effectiveness of constituent communications are relative newcomers to the political process, but have already demonstrated their usefulness in targeting and voter contact. To accomplish this, Plus Three has leveraged our success in creating ARCOS, bringing our expertise in building massively large, scalable, easy-to-use database platforms to the state party level."
About Blaemire Communications
Blaemire Communications has been providing political computer services and voter file products to State Parties, Campaigns and Organizations for over 13 years. The Company combines political expertise with the latest computer technologies to help their clients target and reach the people they need to win campaigns or achieve their organization's goals.
AHR Selects Plus Three to Persuade President Bush to Keep His Promise to the Great Outdoors
Posted on 09/08/2004 @ 10:44 AM
Petition Drive Focused on Getting Americans Outdoors and Preserving America
Plus Three, LP ("Plus Three" or the "Company"), a strategic marketing and technology agency serving major US political organizations and world-class non-profit institutions, today announced that it has been selected by Americans for Our Heritage and Recreation (AHR) to create and manage its national petitioning system. Plus Three's technology will help AHR gather support to persuade President Bush to keep his promise to fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). Through a national public education campaign entitled Americans Saving American Places (ASAP) focused on getting Americans outdoors, AHR has initiated a petition drive to gather a million signatures. To meet their goals, AHR required a petition tool that was flexible enough to easily modify and distribute to a variety of outdoor themed audiences.
"AHR represents a diverse body of organizations who all promote outdoor activities," said Tom St. Hilaire, executive director for AHR. "The challenge for us was creating and distributing relevant petitions that would encourage participation from a broad audience. Without Plus Three, this task would have cost significantly more and required additional time and resources. Plus Three allowed us to focus on the signatures and not worry about the technology."
In AHR, outdoor enthusiasts, advocates and conservationists, with a wide range of policy interests, network together to ensure the preservation of the LWCF. Plus Three designed a petitioning system that allows the different member-groups of the AHR to personalize the petitions with unique messaging and petition Web pages. In addition, Plus Three included tracking functions that enabled AHR to view results across organizations and report back on the petitions that are driving the most signatures.
"The flexibility of interactive tools, such as petition pages and surveys, have empowered organizations to use their Web sites to inspire casual visitors to become online activists," said Plus Three founder and President, Juan Proaño. "Plus Three enables organizations to enhance these relationships between organizations and their visitors, but, more importantly, we allow organizations to use the Internet to proactively reach out to like-minded individuals and directly encourage their participation."
About Americans for Our Heritage and Recreation
Americans for Our Heritage and Recreation (AHR) is a broad and diverse organization representing conservationists, the recreation and sporting goods industries, park and recreation specialists, wildlife enthusiasts, advocates for urban and wilderness areas, preservationists of cultural and historic sites, land trust advocates, the youth sports community, and civic groups seeking to revitalize the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) and the Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Program (UPARR). The coalition works to communicate to policy makers at all levels of government the value of parks and recreation areas made possible by the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the need for support of these areas. AHR mobilizes this national coalition through its extensive grassroots communications network, employing regional and state leaders to coordinate an integrated public education campaign.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Taps Plus Three for Web Advertising and Fundraising Initiatives
Posted on 08/30/2004 @ 10:46 AM
Plus Three's Innovative Technology, Strategic Market Planning Methodology Drives Selection Decision
Plus Three, LP ("Plus Three" or the "Company"), a strategic marketing and technology agency serving major US political organizations and world-class non-profit institutions, today announced that it has been selected by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (the "DSCC," www.dscc.org) to lead its online advertising and fundraising initiatives for the critical 2004 elections. Plus Three's engagement calls for the Company to provide media planning and acquisitions strategies for the DSCC's entire Web advertising campaign, as well as implementation of an Internet-based persuasion campaign to attract donations in support of Democratic Senatorial candidates. The DSCC is the national committee of the Democratic Party formed to elect Democratic members of the United States Senate.
"Our selection of Plus Three reflects the enormous confidence we have in their ability to persuade voters to support the election of Democratic candidates to the US Senate in this crucial election," said DSCC spokesperson Cara Morris. "Plus Three has a proven track record of planning and executing campaigns that are extremely compelling to constituents we are seeking to support our effort. This is largely the product of the Company's ability to combine the power of outstanding technology to reach the largest segment of an audience to create a sustainable dialogue and community, with outstanding creative product and highly targeted delivery. This kind of precision is essential to ensure that the DSCC achieves its election year goals."
Plus Three is the leading provider of online marketing and fundraising services for progressive causes. Since its inception, the Company has been tapped by leading Democratic organization and candidates to support their election efforts with highly targeted online campaigns. Online fundraising took on added significance during the recent Democratic Party primary, as candidates capitalized on the medium to build widespread communities and attract donations. Evidence of the increasing vitality and importance of the Web as a campaign fundraising tool — during the first half of 2004, Plus Three has raised $100 million on line since the start of 2004 in support of progressive campaigns and causes.
Plus Three will spearhead the DSCC's online fundraising efforts for the 2004 election cycle. The multidisciplinary team will increase online giving through DSCC.org and FromTheRoots.org, the DSCC's community weblog. The Plus Three team will lead redesigns for both sites, develop a cross-modal narrative and media plan, streamline the technology for online giving, and increase online participation through online acquisition efforts.
"We're extremely pleased to develop and implement this important campaign for the DSCC," said Plus Three founder and president, Juan Proaño. "The ability to leverage the power of the Internet is critical to shaping the outcomes of this year's important elections. Our technology offers an important means for every individual to be part of the process, but helping them to form enduring communities where they can access information and share their views."
About the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) is the national committee of the Democratic Party formed to elect Democratic members of the United States Senate. The DSCC enables Democratic candidates to conduct effective campaigns that reach voters and secure the election of a Democratic Senate in the year 2004.
Democrats Unleash "Demzilla" on the GOP
Scott Eden
Business Intelligence Pipeline
Aug 24, 2004
With Election Day little more than three months away, the technology department at the Democratic National Committee is hiring, and evidently their desire to staff up at such a late date has a lot to do with the success of their huge voter and donor tracking system.
About three years ago, the DNC hired Plus Three, a small technology firm that specializes in IT consulting for nonprofit organizations, to help build its system. The decision came at a pivotal moment, not long before the 2002 midterm elections, when the Republican Party had had such a system up and running for some time.
The DNC, meanwhile, had a decrepit internal database running off an AS/400. It had a green-screen terminal interface, and it contained an e-mail donor list of just 70,000 people, said Doug Kelly, the DNC's technology director. "When you think that 50 million people voted for Gore, we did a dismal job."
Many observers, in fact, partly attribute the GOP's state and federal victories in that election to its far more mature, and enormous, database of voters and contributors, known as Voter Vault, about which the party is as tight-lipped as a Langley Cold Warrior.
The DNC is a little less so about its system, which is now Web-based and open-source. The system comes in two pieces: DataMart is essentially a gigantic phonebook of all the country's 166 million registered voters. The goal is to attach key information, or a voter ID, to each of those people — party affiliation, some consumer data, how their home precinct voted, census figures, 306 slices of information in all — and then to mine and model that data in order to perform two functions: entice voters to the booths to vote Democrat, and entice those already converted to fork over cash or, perhaps, to volunteer in some way. Essentially it's a direct-marketing system tweaked slightly for the political realm. The problem, of course, is getting all that key information attached to the names on the DataMart list. There are privacy issues to deal with, for instance, and an enormous amount of research that must be done, so the database remains incomplete.
The second piece is Demzilla, the DNC's internal transactional database, which includes the names of, and key information on, any person or group with which the DNC does business — the Rolodex. Mostly Demzilla is a list of donors, both large and small. But it also includes volunteers, activists, local and state party leaders, and members of the press.
By phone, by direct mail and, mostly, by e-mail, people on the DataMart list are targeted with ads and political messages, tailored as much as possible to that person, based on what the DNC can dig up about their demographic information, their possible pet issues, etc. Should the person contribute or agree to volunteer, into Demzilla goes that name.
Building the system was not an easy project to undertake or complete, especially with the DNC rushing to catch up with its cross-town rival. DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe, famed for his salesmanship with six-figure donors and the $5000-a-plate set, spearheaded the effort, which largely focuses on small donors, a la MoveOn.org and the early Howard Dean primary campaign. "We shamelessly steal stuff that's effective," the DNC's Kelly said. The DNC also had to broker deals with state Democratic organizations, which feed their voter information into DataMart. Quid pro quo, the information collated in DataMart and Demzilla are then used locally by the state party organs. The database effort was part of a $25 million rehab McAuliffe made of the DNC as a whole.
DNC officials will not divulge just how they're able to mine and analyze and drill down into all that data — the BI end of the DataMart/Demzilla system — the one aspect in which they resemble their tight-lipped Republican counterparts. "I'd rather not talk about that," Kelly said. "I can tell you after November third." He said the DNC uses a mix of BI technology developed both in-house and by outside consultants.
Plus Three, a Washington-based firm with about 21 employees, built the system using an open-source software package similar to EBay's or Google's — Linux operating system from Red Hat, Apache Web server, MySQL database and Practical Extraction Report Language — for reasons of both cost and "freedom," said David Brunton, one of Plus Three's founders. Open-source made the most sense, he said, because the DNC wanted to do its own data mining and analytics. Once Plus Three completed the assembly, it could turn over the source code to the DNC's techies, get them up to speed, and let them have at it. In this particular business, open source also has advantages over closed-format, Brunton said, because changes in potential donor targeting often need to be made on the fly — if people are for some reason unwilling, on a particular day, to give out their phone numbers, the DNC could write up some code to deal with that contingency, and implement it almost immediately. The software runs on a typical open-source hardware stack, consisting of AMD servers from Penguin Computing.
As far as the build-out, Brunton said a major challenge was integrating the database to its disparate data sources. Though open-source made the problem easier to overcome than a closed-format system otherwise would have, he said, another obstacle arose: how to make the physical connections between systems fast enough yet stable enough to handle all that data flow — voter information streaming into DataMart (and then into Demzilla, depending on the direct market success) from volunteers knocking on doors and entering survey questions into laptops, or voters clicking through a DNC e-mail. Plus Three also needed to link DataMart to all the far-flung systems used by the state party organizations.
The answer lay in RSS, or "really simple syndication," a feed technology that first took off among bloggers a few years ago. Plus Three developed its own kind of RSS for the DNC, which allowed it to deliver an XML stream between multiple systems. Plus Three's benchmark for a data-transfer rate was 5,000 records per second when those records needed to be parsed (or decoded and transformed into actual data), and 15,000 per second when they did not. "Anything less than that is probably slower than acceptable," Brunton said, "and anything faster is probably too fragile." Another important piece of gear Plus Three used was Spread, the multicasting technology. Information gathered from online transactions might hit one of ten different servers, said Brunton. But a Spread machine allowed Plus Three to then multicast all the logs from those disparate servers, collecting them in one place, and in real time, rather than waiting for an end-of-the-day update. This timeliness is particularly valuable in the fundraising world, said Brunton. "With the ability to raise $5.5 million or $6.6 million in a day, it's important to know where you are in any given hour. It could affect ad buys, or a get-out-the vote effort."
The DNC says that DataMart and Demzilla have enabled the party to increase its number of listed donors from 400,000 at the time of the 2002 elections to "well over a million now," though it won't be more specific. It has also let the DNC cover the costs of prospecting for donations. No longer does it need to pay third-party vendors for lists of target voters, nor must it outsource its various e-mail campaigns. The cost of a very large e-mail blast, in other words, amounts only to the tech staff's payroll.
As good as all this sounds, the viability of the system has been called into question before. About a year ago, an article in Roll Call, the Capitol Hill weekly, quoted an anonymous "consultant," who said, "The system architecture is overly cumbersome and the result is that the data is not easily retrieved ... Worse, the quality of the data is far from a level that would make it immediately useful." Both the DNC and Plus Three vigorously denied this, of course. They say a different kind of politics was at work: sour grapes. The comment, they say, came from a Plus Three rival rejected by the DNC.
Knowing Their Politics by Their Software
Steve Lohr
New York Times
Jul 5, 2004
In a campaign season of polarization, when Republicans and Democrats seem far apart on issues like Iraq, the economy and leadership style, it is perhaps not surprising that the parties find themselves on different sides in the politics of software as well.
The Web sites of Senator John Kerry and the Democratic National Committee run mainly on the technology of the computing counterculture: open-source software that is distributed free, and improved and debugged by far-flung networks of programmers.
In the other corner, the Web sites of President Bush and the Republican National Committee run on software supplied by the corporate embodiment of big business — Microsoft.
The two sides are defined largely by their approach to intellectual property. Fans of open-source computing regard its software as a model for the future of business, saying that its underlying principle of collaboration will eventually be used in pharmaceuticals, entertainment and other industries whose products are tightly protected by patents or copyrights.
Many of them propose rewriting intellectual property laws worldwide to limit their scope and duration. The open-source path, they insist, should accelerate the pace of innovation and promote long-term economic growth. Theirs is an argument of efficiency, but also of a reshuffling of corporate wealth.
Microsoft and other American companies, by contrast, have long argued that intellectual property is responsible for any edge the United States has in an increasingly competitive global economy. Craig Mundie, chief technical officer and a senior strategist at Microsoft, observed, "Whether copyrights, patents or trade secrets, it was this foundation in law that made it possible for companies to raise capital, take risks, focus on the long term and create sustainable business models."
The dispute can take on a political flavor at times. David Brunton, who is a founder of Plus Three, a technology and marketing consulting company that has done much of the work on the Democratic and Kerry Web sites, regards open-source software as a technological expression of his political beliefs. Mr. Brunton, 28, a Harvard graduate, describes himself as a "very left-leaning Democrat." He met his wife, Lina, through politics; she is a staff member at the Democratic National Committee.
His company's client list includes state Democratic parties in Ohio and Missouri, and union groups including the United Federation of Teachers and the parent A.F.L.-C.I.O. "The ethic of open source has pervaded progressive organizations," Mr. Brunton said.
The corporate proponents of strong intellectual property rights say, in essence, that what is good for Microsoft, Merck and Disney is good for America. But they argue as well that the laws that protect them also protect the ideas of upstart innovators. They have made their case forcefully in Washington and before international groups, notably the World Intellectual Property Organization, a United Nations specialized agency.
"This is a huge ideological debate and it goes way beyond software," said James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, a nonprofit group affiliated with Ralph Nader that advocates less restrictive intellectual property rules.
But the politics surrounding open-source software do not always fit neatly into party categories. The people who work on software like the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server and others are an eclectic bunch of technologists. "You'll find gun nuts along with total lefties," Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, said in an e-mail message.
Still, those who find the cooperative, open-source ethos appealing tend most often to be libertarians, populists and progressives. Not surprisingly, open-source software was well represented in Howard Dean's Democratic presidential primary campaign, which so effectively used the Internet and Web logs in grass-roots organizing.
Those open-source advocates will presumably find Senator Kerry more appealing than President Bush, according to Daniel Weitzner, technology and society director at the World Wide Web Consortium, an Internet standards-setting organization.
"It may be that the populist-versus-establishment dynamic plays out as Democrat versus Republican in this election," Mr. Weitzner said. "But the open-source movement is a populist phenomenon, enabled by the Internet, and not a partisan force in any traditional sense of politics."
The lone trait common to open-source supporters, according to Mr. Torvalds, is individualism. Politically, he said, that can manifest itself as independence from either political party. "But it also shows up as a distrust of big companies," Mr. Torvalds wrote, "so it's not like the individualism is just about politics."
Eric Raymond, a leading open-source advocate, writing in his online "Jargon File," described the politics of the archetypal open-source programmer, whom he calls J. Random Hacker, as "vaguely liberal-moderate, except for the strong libertarian contingent, which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely."
Mr. Raymond, for one, shoots pistols for relaxation (a favorite is "the classic 1911 pattern .45 semiautomatic") and he supported the invasion of Iraq.
So was the software for the Republican and Democratic Web sites selected according to politics?
Microsoft, to be sure, has fared far better under the Bush administration than under the administration of President Bill Clinton. The Clinton Justice Department filed a sweeping antitrust suit against Microsoft, and asked that the big software company be broken up. The Bush administration later settled the case and left Microsoft intact.
Referring to the software selection process, Steve Ellis, director of network and online services for the Republican National Committee, said: "There was no pressure. We were free to use whatever software we thought worked best."
The principal consideration, Mr. Ellis said, was computer security and protecting the privacy of personal data on the Web site. The programming tools, procedures and the larger pool of workers skilled in using Microsoft software, he said, prompted the Republicans to opt for Microsoft's Web server, called Internet Information Services, running on the Windows 2000 operating system.
Both the Microsoft Web site software and the open-source alternative, the Apache server running on Linux, have had security problems, said Richard M. Smith, a computer security expert. But the Microsoft software, he said, "clearly is the least secure of the two Web serving solutions," given its susceptibility to infection by malicious computer worms like Code Red and Nimba.
For technology experts, like Mr. Brunton, software may have a political cast. But there is little evidence that it has become an issue for front-office political operatives. Told that the Democratic National Committee Web site runs on open-source software, Tony Welch, the national committee's press secretary, replied, "Oh, thanks for telling me." Later, after checking with his technical staff, Mr. Welch called back to say that open-source software was "the right technology at the right price."
Both the Democratic and Republican sites have done pretty well. Mr. Kerry has raised more than $56 million over the Internet this year, including $3 million last Wednesday, setting a single-day record for online fund-raising. The Republican Web site won an award in March from George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet for the best online campaign by a political party.
"The Web site is a great grass-roots organizing tool, and we've probably just scratched the surface," said Christine Iverson, press secretary for the Republican National Committee.
Plus Three Launches Upgrade Of Fund-Raising Software
Larry Greenemeier
Information Week
Jun 28, 2004
One of the key companies behind the Democratic National Committee's IT infrastructure--more commonly referred to as Demzilla--on Monday launched the latest version of its open-source fund-raising software. Version 3.1 of Plus Three LP's Arcos software lets fund-raising organizations and political campaigns treat their constituents more like consumers, thanks to business-intelligence features designed to enable more direct marketing.
The Democratic National Committee, Plus Three's largest customer, is using Arcos technology to store and track campaign donors much like customer-relationship-management software does for large companies. The committee has on file about 166 million registered voters that it can use to target people who might be undecided or leaning away from the party, says David Brunton, Plus Three's VP of sales and marketing.
Missouri's Democratic Party is using Plus Three's technology to make the most of the data it gathers from volunteers collecting information door-to-door. State branches of the party are the ones closest to the voters, says Jim Kottmeyer, executive director of the Missouri Democratic Party. "The plan is to send batch downloads to the national database," he says. In return, Missouri will receive reports that analyze the voter data it contributes to the national campaign effort.
"There are 2.4 million voters in the state of Missouri. We have to know which ones to talk to," Kottmeyer says. "Politics is all driven by voter-specific information these days."
The Republican National Committee also has a voter data repository, called Voter Vault, although a party spokeswoman declined to give specifics regarding its technology.
Democrats Tap Open Source
Peter Galli
eWeek
Jun 28, 2004
Open source has expanded into the political world, with open software powering the online operations of the Democratic National Committee and Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign.
The DNC has embraced open source to run its online operation, including outreach and fund raising, and has been working on this front since 2001 with New York-based consultant Plus Three LP.
This week, the DNC will launch, at www.democrats.org, the third version of its Web site, which is designed to mobilize voters on a national and grass-roots level, grow the party's online database, and raise funds, said David Brunton, Plus Three's vice president and co-founder.
Plus Three's Arcos technology, a business application suite based on the open-source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl) platform, lies at the core of the Democrats' online technology infrastructure, dubbed Demzilla by the DNC.
Demzilla is credited with helping the DNC grow its online contributions, as well as its online community, from 70,000 to more than 1.7 million members, said DNC officials in Washington.
So far this year, Plus Three's open technologies have helped the DNC raise more than $60 million online for Democratic presidential contender Kerry and the DNC.
Plus Three, which serves the political, nonprofit and advocacy vertical market, uses Red Hat Inc.'s Red Hat Linux primarily, but it has several developers working on Debian. Plus Three also uses Version 1.3 of the Apache Web server, mainly because of compatibility with its Perl engine, but also uses Apache 2.0 for caching.
Plus Three builds mainly on MySQL AB's MySQL database but also works with PostgreSQL for particular narrow and tall indexes, while most of the code generated inside Plus Three is written in Perl, Brunton said.
"Open-source technologies provide freedom for our clients—both freedom from licensing fees, of which we charge none, as well as, in many cases, freedom from the kinds of attacks that can debilitate more closed alternatives," Brunton said.
"We do three kinds of work for the DNC," Brunton said. "The first is customized, technical work on a fixed-price basis. The second type of work is regular maintenance for a monthly fee, while the last kind of work done is a retainer for managing the DNC's online advertising and e-mail enhancements."
The short-term costs of the Plus Three DNC solution are far lower than those of proprietary alternatives, including Windows, primarily due to the licensing fees that would have had to be paid upfront, Brunton said.
Plus Three Technology Helps Democratic National Committee Achieve a 600% Increase in Online Contributions
Posted on 12/02/2003 @ 09:58 AM
Plus Three LP, a strategic marketing and technology services agency today announces that the website platform it developed for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has contributed to a 600% increase in online contributions in the third quarter of 2003. Hired to help the DNC upgrade their online communications capabilities, Plus Three rebuilt their website (www.democrats.org), adding an internal transactional database and an email delivery platform. Launched in February 2002, under the moniker "Demzilla", the initiative is credited with helping double online contributions to the DNC since its inception, including a 600% increase in the most recent quarter.
"To win campaigns you need three things: money, message, and mobilization. The tools Plus Three has helped the DNC build allow us to maximize our performance in all three areas," said Doug Kelly, Director of Technology for the Democratic National Committee. "We've been able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of activists across the country to communicate with their representatives, register with democrats.org, and actively participate with the Party. Voters can go to www.democrats.org and see what the Democrats are doing on the issues they care about most, and then find out how they can get involved."
In February 2001, Terry McAuliffe was elected as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and quickly ordered a top to bottom review of the DNC's technology operations. McAuliffe brought in QRS Newmedia, a Washington, D.C. communications technology consultancy, to conduct the assessment and develop a blueprint for leveraging new technologies to ensure that the Democrats' nominee for president would have the best foundation upon which to build a victory in 2004. QRS Newmedia selected Plus Three to build "Demzilla," the database platform at the core of the DNC's new technology infrastructure.
The project had three overarching goals," said Laura Quinn, Managing Partner of QRS Newmedia, "to enable the Democrats to reconnect with grassroots voters, to raise money — in particular among small donors, and to move their message more quickly and more effectively. To execute this successfully, we knew we'd need a development partner that was very flexible, and willing to understand the DNC's unique organizational needs. Plus Three provided all that and much more."
When Terry McAuliffe took over as Chairman, the DNC had email addresses for about 70,000 voters. Today they maintain more than 1.7 million email addresses from voters across the country, significantly lowering their fundraising costs.
"Before this initiative was complete we outsourced email communications, but as our list grew our costs grew. We felt penalized for our success," said Kelly. "By bringing the technology in-house, we no longer have to do a cost-benefit analysis about whether to communicate with voters when an issue breaks. Every communication now delivers net benefit."
"It was very important to voters that the DNC speak to the issues they specifically cared about, and that the website enable them to take action, which required a high level of personalization," said Juan Proaño. "With the Demzilla platform, the DNC has the means to message voters more quickly, more frequently, and in a personalized manner, as events occur. And by basing our development on open source software, the DNC can continue to evolve and grow their platform very cost-effectively as technology improves."
"We had to build a better engine to reach out to the Democratic base," said Kelly. "An engine that would allow us to establish stronger ties with voters, and mobilize them quickly," says Kelly. "Plus Three has been a great partner in this effort."
Plus Three to Present at EgovOS.org Conference
Posted on 03/11/2003 @ 10:00 AM
Plus Three, a leader in Free and Open Source software development, will be presenting a real world case study of how they achieved a sustained peak website throughput of over 60 gigabits per second while delivering dynamically generated content and keeping site response times under a second on a small cluster of commodity Intel hardware for one of their clients.
The Center of Open Source & Government (EgovOS.org) is hosting "Open Standards/Open Source for National and Local eGovernment Programs in the U.S. and EU". The conference will be held in Washington, D.C. on March. 17 – 19, 2003 and include industry leaders including Red Hat, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Plus Three.
Registration is free, and available now. The conference will be held at The George Washington University's Cafritz Conference Center, The George Washington University, 800 21st Street, NW in Washington, D.C., 20052.
"We've squeezed impressive scalability out of commodity hardware," says David Brunton, Plus Three's VP of Technology. "Maintaining website uptime during traffic spikes is a rapidly growing practice area for Plus Three."
Plus Three creates standards and systems for organizations that need to transmit, store, update and analyze large data sets. They specialize in building semantic web interfaces to these data sets.
Plus Three Builds Democratic National Committee's 2004 Weapon
Posted on 03/04/2003 @ 10:03 AM
Technology Firm Created Database of Over 150 Million Voters, Targeting and Message Delivery Mechanisms
New technology from Plus Three drives the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) "Demzilla," platform. Plus Three, a technology firm based in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C, spent 18 months developing Demzilla, an XML and Internet based database of voters and donors with state-of-the-art marketing and analysis capabilities. Democrats will use the system to improve fundraising and to communicate with voters in their "Project 5104" plan to win back the White House in 2004.
"In Demzilla, Plus Three has delivered the kind of far-reaching, aggressive technology that will allow Democrats to get out the message and the vote in 2004, sending us to victory," said DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe.
Laura Quinn of QRS Newmedia, the consultant who drove the decision for the Democratic party's technology upgrade, stated: "I was extremely happy with our choice of vendors. Plus Three has provided us with a stable, scalable solution, and has been incredibly active in this process of upgrading the Democrats' technology."
"We wanted to deliver a solution that was cost effective and secure, a system that could grow with the DNC, and we did just that," said Juan Proaño, President of Plus Three. "We look forward working with the DNC to ensure that their technology stays ahead of the times."
Plus Three creates standards and systems for organizations that need to transmit, store, update and analyze large data sets. They specialize in building semantic web interfaces to these data sets.
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