US site offers political donation information on neighbours
Howard Lake | 31 March 2004 | News
Using public information from electronic contributions, Fundrace.org lets Americans find out who has donated what and to which presidential campaign.
The site lets you search on your neighbourhood to see what your neighbours have given and to which presidential candidate. You can, if you wish, search for the giving activities and political leanings of friends, colleagues and even celebrities, should you so wish. The data available is name, occupation, employer, and contribution address.
The site aims to offer transparency to political campaign finance. It certainly offers a remarkable range of methods of amalgamating the data available. For example, you can see which candidate attracts the most small contributions from all over America (Howard Dean), who inspires most repeat giving (John Edwards), and gets most of the large contributions from wealthy Americans (John F Kerry).
Advertisement
You can also see city maps which detail the location and geographical spread of Republican and Democrat donors. You can even see a list of the top buildings for each party in terms of the value of donations coming from individuals at those addresses.
As such it could offer prospect researchers a tremendous opportunity to evaluate current and prospective donors. There is nothing remotely comparable in the UK: the closest is the Electoral Commission’s Register of donations to political parties.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.