I agree? This applies more to donating to orgs than donating to politicians. And regardless when my team recommends donating to politicians, usually we have a fundraising target after which we no longer recommend it (and sometimes we ask for pledges and then ask a subset of pledgers to donate, in order to hit the target and avoid using small donors unnecessarily), and other times we’re like “this is one of the best opportunities; the optimal amount of money we could raise is more than we will actually be able to raise because there aren’t enough small donors; everyone should donate (after donating to everything better and having a certain budget saved for future small-donor opportunities).” (Most of our recommendations are the former kind, but a donor might tend to hear about the latter kind because for the former we only need to tell a small set of donors while for the latter we’re telling everyone who might be interested.)
I’m a small donor, so my experience with your cluster[1] has been strictly about political candidates. Within that, someone in the cluster (not you or Eric) pushed me to push someone else to donate more at the the 11th hour on the first day of fundraising. At that point they already knew fundraising had been incredibly successful and the marginal value of a donation had decreased a lot, but didn’t tell me until after I’d pushed the other person. Credit to them for telling me at all, but I would have made different choices if I’d had all the information. Maybe it’s totally unfair to tar everyone in the apparent cluster based on this person’s actions, maybe if I knew the formal relationships and had more information about you and Eric I’d see them as a crazy rogue, but with the information I have I have to expect more of the same. Which doesn’t mean I’m not donating, but does really limit the amount I’ll defer.
+1 to Zach’s comment. It’s true that politicians always ask for more money; however, we don’t always ask for more money from donors. For almost all fundraisers, there’s a target amount we’re trying to hit. The only exceptions are the rare fundraisers that we think are good enough that we won’t be able to saturate them to our funding bar.
So yeah, politicians don’t say “we have enough money, save it for the next guy”, but we do.
You wrote public posts advocating for donations to Alex Bores and Scott Weiner. AFAIK you never followed up with a post saying that you thought their campaigns had now received enough funding. Is that because you still think it’s one of the top priorities, or some other reason (e.g. not wanting to seem adversarial)? I realize that if it’s #2 then you can’t answer this question but it seems to me that if you publicly argue for donations to something and then later you believe the room-for-more-funding is filled, then it’s good to provide a public update.
(I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s obligatory to provide a public update. I believe [weakly held] that writing the initial posts and not following up is better than not writing any posts.)
I agree? This applies more to donating to orgs than donating to politicians. And regardless when my team recommends donating to politicians, usually we have a fundraising target after which we no longer recommend it (and sometimes we ask for pledges and then ask a subset of pledgers to donate, in order to hit the target and avoid using small donors unnecessarily), and other times we’re like “this is one of the best opportunities; the optimal amount of money we could raise is more than we will actually be able to raise because there aren’t enough small donors; everyone should donate (after donating to everything better and having a certain budget saved for future small-donor opportunities).” (Most of our recommendations are the former kind, but a donor might tend to hear about the latter kind because for the former we only need to tell a small set of donors while for the latter we’re telling everyone who might be interested.)
I’m a small donor, so my experience with your cluster[1] has been strictly about political candidates. Within that, someone in the cluster (not you or Eric) pushed me to push someone else to donate more at the the 11th hour on the first day of fundraising. At that point they already knew fundraising had been incredibly successful and the marginal value of a donation had decreased a lot, but didn’t tell me until after I’d pushed the other person. Credit to them for telling me at all, but I would have made different choices if I’d had all the information. Maybe it’s totally unfair to tar everyone in the apparent cluster based on this person’s actions, maybe if I knew the formal relationships and had more information about you and Eric I’d see them as a crazy rogue, but with the information I have I have to expect more of the same. Which doesn’t mean I’m not donating, but does really limit the amount I’ll defer.
I’m not sure what the formal relationships are
+1 to Zach’s comment. It’s true that politicians always ask for more money; however, we don’t always ask for more money from donors. For almost all fundraisers, there’s a target amount we’re trying to hit. The only exceptions are the rare fundraisers that we think are good enough that we won’t be able to saturate them to our funding bar.
So yeah, politicians don’t say “we have enough money, save it for the next guy”, but we do.
You wrote public posts advocating for donations to Alex Bores and Scott Weiner. AFAIK you never followed up with a post saying that you thought their campaigns had now received enough funding. Is that because you still think it’s one of the top priorities, or some other reason (e.g. not wanting to seem adversarial)? I realize that if it’s #2 then you can’t answer this question but it seems to me that if you publicly argue for donations to something and then later you believe the room-for-more-funding is filled, then it’s good to provide a public update.
(I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s obligatory to provide a public update. I believe [weakly held] that writing the initial posts and not following up is better than not writing any posts.)
I continue to believe that donations to Bores are the #1 best donation opportunity, and that donations to Wiener are the #2 donation opportunity!