Online fundraising is the backbone of Democratic campaigns. The gusher of small-dollar donations that accelerated during the Trump years has been a powerful advantage for the party, delivering for candidates up and down the ballot.
It is also hugely inefficient.
Campaigns are spending an increasing share of their funds each cycle just to find and contact donors. Money often goes not to those in competitive races but to those with recognizable brands or hated opponents. And the entire enterprise can be frustrating for donors who find themselves bombarded with emails and text messages.
Brian Derrick knows all that. So he helped co-found Oath, a new fundraising platform that aims to connect Democratic donors with the campaigns that need their money the most.
The premise is simple: Help donors optimize their giving by calculating the impact additional money would have on different races. The firm bases that on a range of factors, including the competitiveness of a given election and how much cash a campaign already has. Each campaign or committee on the platform receives a score between 1 and 10, with a higher score indicating the greater impact of donations.
“There’s no one really in the ecosystem saying, ‘Enough is enough. A hundred million [dollars] is more than enough,’” Derrick said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine.
Oath is partisan, but not ideological — it’s not purposely trying to boost progressives or moderates. And it has no formal backing from anywhere in the party, though professional fundraisers have quietly signaled their support. The company makes money off contributions donors can leave for the platform.
For now, Oath is just a drop in the broader Democratic fundraising ocean: Since a soft launch last fall, it has processed more than $3 million from more than 100,000 distinct donations. ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising giant, processes millions of donations and billions of dollars, each year.
But if Oath is successful, it might be the start of a new, more sophisticated era in online fundraising.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Talk to me about why you founded Oath and what the platform aims to do.
I, like many other people, saw a misallocation of resources across the political ecosystem and really attributed that to information asymmetry.
You have campaigns and candidates who know the likelihood they are going to win, or how much money they have and how much their opponent has. And the average donor has none of that information. All they have to go off of are viral tweets and Facebook ads to figure out where to give their money.
And so the goal in creating Oath and launching this platform was to create a tool for donors that would balance the scale and put the data in their hands — the same data that donor advisers provide to millionaires and billionaires who give a lot of money in politics — and to enable the average donor in 30 seconds to take action that is based on thousands of hours of........