• by Kate Kaye , June 25, 2004

John Kerry Botox jokes aside, the Democratic party's main moneymaker has received a face-lift in preparation for the already intense election season. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) launches the third iteration of its Web site today in an effort to fuel online fund raising, expand its online database, and spur grassroots action among supporters.

New site technology upgrades allow visitors to input ZIP codes to connect with local voter registration services and learn more about Democratic events and fund-raising activities in their area. In addition, they can sign up to receive customized emails featuring locally relevant information and updates on issues in which they've expressed particular interest.

While the DNC won't be runnng ads to promote the new site launch specifically, it will continue to run Web ads in conjunction with integrated telemarketing, direct mail, email, and door-to-door efforts framed around political issues. According to Juan Proano, president and co-founder of Plus Three, the marketing and technology agency behind the DNC's database technology, the group also places bids with Google and Yahoo!'s Overture on issue-oriented search keywords such as "minimum wage," "economy," and "education."

The DNC is targeting campaigns to battleground states and districts through geographic, psychographic, and demographic data. "The targeting will get more narrow as we get down into the election cycle," Proano anticipates. "Data acquisition is a very significant portion of what we're doing." The firm built the technology for the DNC's ePatriots fund-raising program that enables supporters to create their own Web pages on Democrats.org, persuade others to donate, and keep track of the dollars they've helped to harvest.

Plus Three developed a candidate version of the fund-raising technology--part of its Arcos suite of tools, which drives the John Kerry for President campaign's Kerry Core fund-raising program. The company provides campaign strategy, design, and tech services for political, nonprofit, and advocacy groups including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, AARP, AFL-CIO, and state parties in swing states such as Ohio.

In designing the new Web site, Plus Three conducted sessions with focus groups and took into consideration the importance of accessibility to all users, including the disabled. In compliance with guidelines set up under the Americans with Disabilities Act, coded descriptions known as alt tags were attributed to all Web site images to ease site navigation by sight-impaired people. The use of a Flash intro to the site was also a no-no. "It excludes so many people," Proano explains.

Citing Federal Election Commission data released this month, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that the DNC and all its affiliated committees have paid Plus Three over $461,000 this year for media, technology, and computer-related services. The Center also reports that the DNC and affiliated committees doled out more than $355,000 to media consulting firm QRSNewmedia for Web-related work this year. Neither the DNC nor QRSNewmedia responded to interview requests made by MediaDailyNews for this story.

The DNC's database--referred to by party insiders as "Demzilla," in recognition of the open-source Mozilla technology on which its platform is based--currently stores the records of 166 million U.S. voters, according to Proano. He insists that opt-in registrations represent the largest portion of those records. The database is also grown through referrals from affiliated organizations as well as through co-registrations on publisher sites such as ChicagoTribune.com, NYTimes.com, and washingtonpost.com.

Supporters who are referred through other sites "are the most active and most likely to contribute," Proano says, noting several findings determined through campaign results analysis and donor profile modeling. Among them: "People will give money at different rates at different times." This discovery has prompted PlusThree to deliver multiple campaigns at once. The company treats individuals in its database differently according to giving history, email open rate, and other criteria. "We mail to the most active responders first," says Proano, who was surprised to learn that "people who open emails less frequently give more often."

While he believes that it is "very difficult" to measure the efficacy of campaign components on a discrete level, Proano notes that email campaign results are easier than others to decipher. Regardless, he concludes that in the end, measurement of a political campaign after the election is futile if the candidate loses.