LTO Links #305

Email Deliverability Feud Escalates

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Issue #305 |

Advertising

Here’s the first political advertising of a post-Roe world

"Democratic fundraising appeals have been met with a degree of backlash. A viral clip of a protester complaining about a party text message asking for a $15 donation summed up the sentiment: “They have had multiple opportunities to codify Roe into law over the past 20, 30, 40, 50 years, and they haven’t done it, and if they’re going to keep campaigning on this point, they should actually do something about it,” protester Zoe Warren told MSNBC."

Data

The DNC has a new secret weapon for finding voters

"The DNC’s new Geographic Address Dataset is a repository of 260 million addresses in the U.S., which the tech team painstakingly compiled by combining nearly a dozen sources — from the voter file to Postal Service data to records from private vendors. That includes 25 million new addresses that were never before included in the DNC’s records. The team affixed nearly all of the 260 million records with census block data, giving Democratic campaigns a new window into demographic information on hundreds of millions of homes, as well as geocodes, which tell campaigns the actual latitude and longitude of where hard-to-find homes exist on a map."

Email

GOP's Gmail feud escalates

"But it says during the final four days of every month since December 2021 — a crucial period for digital fundraising operations — that number has skyrocketed to 100% or close to it, even as the rate of emails marked as spam by recipients remains steady."

War of Words Over Email Deliverability Highlights Partisan Divide on Best Practices

"The back-and-forth highlighted two trend lines that may have implications longer term for this sector of the campaign industry. The first is an increasingly public animosity between some practitioners on opposite sides of the aisle. The second is the level of agreement — or lack thereof — around best practices for things like email and text, channels where the tactics of one side could impact the deliverability of sends by the other."

Google moves to keep campaign messages out of spam

"How it works: Google's pilot program, per the June 21 filing, would be for "authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership political action committees registered with the FEC."

  • It would make campaign emails from such groups exempt from spam detection as long as they don't violate Gmail's policies around phishing, malware or illegal content.

  • Instead, when users would receive an email from a campaign for the first time, they would get a “prominent” notification asking if they want to keep receiving them, and would still have "the ability to opt out of subsequent emails.

Fundraising

As midterms approach, GOP online fundraising platform announces nearly $3 billion raised in just three years

"WinRed is marking the third anniversary since its founding by announcing it has raised nearly $3 billion dollars for more than 5,000 Republican campaigns as it plans to continue making big impacts in the 2022 midterm elections."

International

This secretive digital weapon propelled an outsider candidate to Colombia’s presidential runoff

"In December 2021, the Hernández campaign signed a contract with Wappid, a software that on the surface resembles a social network, connecting supporters primarily via WhatsApp, which is used by roughly 92% of Colombians. But Wappid also uses referral marketing techniques and gamification to encourage registered users to grow their own personal support networks under the umbrella of Rodolfistas.wappid.com."