What is actblue?

ActBlue is a political action committee that raises funds for Democratic and progressive candidates, campaigns, and organizations through its online platform. The organization says they "build and power the premier online fundraising platform for Democratic campaigns, progressive organizations, and nonprofits working to create a better future."[1] As of April 2020, ActBlue had raised over $4.8 billion since its founding in 2004.[2] Contributions distributed through the platform are individual donations, not PAC donations.[3]

As of April 2020, ActBlue's website included the following mission statement:[4]

ActBlue was founded in 2004 to help progressive and Democratic fundraising for electoral and ballot measure campaigns. According to its website, ActBlue aims to further build fundraising technology for the left. Derek Willis at The New York Times reported that ActBlue began "as an experiment by two friends wanting to finance progressive causes" and has become "a major fund-raising mechanism for the Democratic Party."[6][7][8]

In June 2019, Republicans created WinRed as a direct response to the work of ActBlue.[9]

ActBlue's website says that it works to "develop top-of-the-line fundraising software and offer simple, intuitive tools to help campaigns and organizations connect with new and existing grassroots donors." As an online fundraising platform, the organization itself does not actually donate any money to these candidates.[10][7] As such, ActBlue has a number of affiliated organizations to comply with federal and state laws regarding political donations. The organization's website says it acts as a conduit for fundraising online but does not itself raise money for any group. The directory provided on its website allows potential donors to select specific ballot initiatives, organizations or candidates to support.[7][11] ActBlue lists the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) as major organizations that use ActBlue's platform to receive donations from individual voters.[7]

In March 2016, POLITICO reported that ActBlue had raised its billionth dollar since it began operations in 2004. According to the report, over $100 million of the billion dollars came from donations to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' (D) 2016 presidential campaign.[12]

According to an October 2018 analysis by FiveThirtyEight, the $564 million raised by ActBlue between January 2017 and September 30, 2018, was 55 percent of all contributions from individual donors to Democratic congressional candidates. This was more than double the percentage of the 2014 election cycle, when ActBlue raised about 19 percent of the total amount of individual donor contributions.[13]

The following election-related data is taken from reports generated by the Center for Responsive Politics, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that tracks money in American politics through its website OpenSecrets.org. The data presented is not comprehensive of all of ActBlue's various affiliated organizations that the group has set up to comply with federal and state campaign finance laws.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, ActBlue raised $1,261,994,020 and spent $1,251,055,073 during the 2018 election cycle.[14]

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, ActBlue spent $276,769 for candidates, $136,190 for the political parties, and $990,498 for 527 committees during the 2016 election cycle.[15]

Expenditures The following table lists the top federal candidates supported by ActBlue in 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.[16]

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, ActBlue spent $45,069 for Democratic candidates, $570 for the Democratic Party and $806,649 for 527 committees during the 2014 election cycle.[17]

Expenditures The following table lists the top federal candidates supported by ActBlue in 2014, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.[18]

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, ActBlue spent $28,677 for Democratic candidates, $4,510 for the Democratic Party and $467,534 for 527 committees during the 2012 election cycle.[19]

Expenditures The following table lists the top 10 campaign donations made by ActBlue to federal candidates in 2012.[20]

According to a 2018 article in McClatchy, the following individuals served in the organizastion's leadership:[21]

The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms 'ActBlue'. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles.

Description ActBlue is an American nonprofit technology organization established in June 2004 that enables left-leaning nonprofits, Democratic candidates, and progressive groups to raise money from individual donors on the Internet by providing them with online fundraising software. Wikipedia

ActBlue is a fundraising platform composed of three separate entities that was created to service left-wing nonprofits and political action committees.1 ActBlue Charities was formed in 2015 as a complementary platform to the liberal fundraising platform ActBlue designed to provide fundraising services to organizations organized as public charities. Similarly, ActBlue Civics exists to serve “social welfare” clients with similar fundraising services.2

The ActBlue website was launched in 2004 by Ben Rahn and Matt DeBergalis as a fundraising platform for left-wing nonprofits and PACs.3 ActBlue Charities was formed 11 years later in 2015.4 According to its own estimates, ActBlue has helped to raise $2.4 billion for its clients since its creation.5

ActBlue is divided into three components, each of which deals with a specific type of donation. ActBlue Non-Federal deals with PAC contributions, ActBlue Civics manages contributions to 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations, and ActBlue Charities manages contributions to 501(c)(3) nonprofits.6

In addition to publishing its list of clients on its website for donors’ ease-of-use, ActBlue also stores contributors’ credit card information, which “reduces the friction involved in filling out donation forms to a single click.”7

ActBlue provides grassroots fundraising software that allows its clients to maximize their impact. These tools are available on all three of their platforms.8 ActBlue also “run randomized experiments to increase the efficiency of its donation forms.”9

ActBlue is a pass-through organization and service for donations to left-of-center nonprofits and PACs. ActBlue Charities is ActBlue’s funding platform built specifically for 501(c)(3) organizations which can receive tax-deductible contributions.

As a service, it charges a transaction fee of 3.95% for each donation it receives and passes along to the final recipient.10

According to ActBlue’s online directory, the following organizations are clients of ActBlue Charities:11

Center for Popular Democracy

Southern Poverty Law Center

Arizona Advocacy Network

People’s Action Institute

Colorofchange.org Education Fund

Courage Campaign Institute

CREDO Action

Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)

Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF)

Mother Jones

Movement Strategy Center

National Immigration Law Center

Transgender Law Center

Voices for Progress Education Fund

Ben Rahn is the founder and director of ActBlue.12

Matt DeBergalis is the chairman and founder of ActBlue.13

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has voiced interest in investigating online fundraising platforms since Democratic opponent Jaime Harrison raised a record-smashing $57 million in the third quarter, said recently of ActBlue: “This thing’s weird to me.”

“It’s transformed Democratic politics, and it’s enabled us to compete with the big bucks boys on the other side,” said former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, whose 2004 presidential run pioneered grassroots online fundraising. But Dean warned that if Trump is ousted, “it will be harder to raise money.”

“Rage gets people to the polls and to give,” Dean noted.

For now, with Trump and Republicans still in office, that money is still rushing in. This election cycle, a majority of Democratic candidates for federal office outraised their Republican opponents, propelled by those small-dollar donors that saved their credit card information with ActBlue. Contributors who gave $200 or less now make up nearly a quarter of the total money raised in 2020, even as super PACs that can raise unlimited sums from a single donor keep getting bigger. That speaks to ActBlue’s exponential surge, with the volume of donations processed doubling in every two-year election cycle since 2012.

“Small-dollar donors are funding everything — 21,000 different candidates and committees and causes — because it’s that kind of scope that involves our democracy,” said Erin Hill, ActBlue’s executive director. “It’s what happening at your school board race and it’s what’s happening in the presidency. Small-dollar donors recognize that, and they’re putting $5 and $10 donations into all these races that matter, which means we are expanding the map of what’s possible and more candidates are competitive.”

In Graham’s eyes, what ActBlue has achieved has gone beyond the realm of what’s possible. “I’d like some group, when this is over, to audit these things,” Graham said, also bringing in WinRed, the GOP-endorsed online fundraising platform. “Look at all of them.”

When asked about Graham’s comments, which have inaccurately portrayed how ActBlue functions, Hill called it a “willful misunderstanding,” adding that she “sees fear” when “you get that kind of pushback.”

ActBlue is an unusual player in the campaign tech landscape. Founded in 2004 as a nonprofit, ActBlue aimed to be a piece of Democratic Party infrastructure, making it “as easy and frictionless as possible,” Hill said, for donors to give as little as $1 to campaigns or progressive groups, lowering the barrier of entry to campaign finance. The platform gained traction in the liberal blogosphere, drafting cash for candidates from regular readers of Daily Kos.

“They were literally calling up campaigns and telling them, ‘we want to send you this money we’ve raised for you because people on the Internet donated to you,’” said Julia Rosen, a Democratic digital strategist. “This was before anyone had a ‘donate’ button their webpage.”

Hill, who joined ActBlue in 2005, called it a “different era” when she had to “explain to people what the internet was and how to use computers.”

“The idea of using technology in campaigns was still very nascent at that point,” Hill said. Now, she added, “it’s turned into a strategic advantage for us on the left.”

As the internet knitted itself into the core of campaign strategy, ActBlue grew and grew, watching its usage tick up alongside the massive small-donor support for President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns — which utilized custom donation processing software, not ActBlue. But Bernie Sanders’ online donor-fueled 2016 presidential run became a “turning point” for digital consultants, who could point to Sanders’ usage of ActBlue and “explain its power to down-ballot candidates,” said Mike Nellis, a former senior adviser to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign who runs Authentic Campaigns, a Democratic digital firm.

Now, signing up for ActBlue is one of the first things Democratic candidates do. It’s atop the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s checklist of pre-launch steps for its candidates, alongside hiring a campaign manager. Akilah Bacy, a Houston Democrat who’s among the candidates running to flip the Texas state House, said she started an ActBlue fundraising page “even before I announced” the campaign.

“I don’t know anyone who’s not using it in their campaign,” said Joanna Cattanach, another Democratic state legislative candidate in Dallas.

The platform allows any Democratic candidate or group to set up a fundraising page and put linked “donate” buttons in their emails and on their website. Small-dollar donors can start giving immediately, and when that cash trickles into ActBlue’s conduit PAC, it wires the money daily or cuts checks to the intended recipient, depending on that candidate or organization’s preference.

Every single donor, no matter how little they gave, is itemized in ActBlue’s voluminous campaign finance disclosures — a key area of misunderstanding for some Republicans, who have falsely accused ActBlue of failing to disclose the sources of the money they raise. (The group’s most recent quarterly FEC report weighed in at 11.6 gigabytes of data.)

Most importantly, ActBlue lets users save their credit card information. Campaigns still have to find their own donors by buying or building email lists, running online ads or getting help from big-name endorsers. But once they do, if those donors have given through ActBlue before, they can give again with one click, a quicker process that generates more money. The site itself is continually testing everything to optimize the giving experience, tweaking things as small as the color of the “donate” button if randomized trials show that it prompts a bigger response from donors. At the scale ActBlue runs, converting donors even a fraction of a percentage point higher means thousands more dollars for users.

To keep itself running and funding tests to improve the service, ActBlue asks donors to “tip” the nonprofit to pay for staff and upkeep. It also has a 4 percent processing fee off of each donation, all of which goes toward paying credit card processing fees, a legal requirement so as to avoid making any in-kind contribution to the groups or campaigns.

“If you’re trying to build technology within a campaign, you usually lack the resources and time is working against you, especially with fundraising, it can be pretty impossible,” said Betsy Hoover, a partner at Higher Ground Labs, a campaign tech incubator. “But ActBlue stays put, cycle after cycle. … If a campaign signs up with ActBlue, then they don’t need to do any of that work, and at this point, no one’s going to try to recreate it. Just take what’s there.”

ActBlue hit another milestone in February 2019, when the Democratic National Committee set the primary debate rules to include a minimum of 65,000 individual donors with 200 each from 20 different states. That decision came under harsh criticism by several presidential candidates for incentivizing “slash and burn” approaches to digital fundraising, but the DNC stuck to it and all 28 candidates used ActBlue.

“The DNC making that choice really set the tone” to center the 2020 campaign on the grassroots, Hill said. When asked if she expected small-dollar donors to play another pivotal role, should there be a 2024 Democratic presidential primary, she said, “Oh, I sure hope so. I think we can’t go back to what we did before.”

In an effort to match Democrats’ machinery, Republicans launched WinRed in June 2019. It has had early success and posted some historic hauls of its own, processing more than $1.2 billion donations in its first year and a half. ActBlue reached that total in 2016, 12 years after its founding — and celebrated the milestone with a do-it-yourself balloon net from Amazon, dropping it on the staff after-hours when they crossed the 10-figure threshold.

But Republican digital consultants privately concede that the fear of ActBlue within their party speaks to a lack of familiarity and knowledge with online fundraising. That lack of awareness is hampering GOP efforts to catch up with Democrats’ online behemoth. Party operatives are not only trying to educate candidates on digital fundraising, they are scrambling to teach GOP voters to make online giving routine, as it has become for Democrats.

“It is extremely frustrating when Republican digital people have spent the better part of two years trying to break the logjam on this, and folks still don’t understand the basics of how it works,” said one Republican digital strategist. “I think they’re genuinely bewildered, and that’s part of our problem.”

Back in October 2018, House Republicans called the surge of donations through ActBlue a “green wave” of money that helped Democrats flip the chamber. And in April 2020, Senate Republicans warned their candidates of a coming “green tsunami” of online money barreling toward them.

Republicans leaned heavily on mega-donors to make up the gap, smashing their own fundraising records at the Senate Leadership Fund, the top GOP Senate super PAC, and at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Even so, 16 Democratic Senate candidates outraised their Republican opponents in the third quarter of this year, powered by online donors.

“There were always going to be more grassroots donors than there could be mega-billionaires,” Hill said.

Eric Wilson, a Republican strategist who led the digital team on Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said that “it’s going to take a long time for Republicans to catch up to that advantage Democrats have built, the network effect of millions of donors with payment info saved” and a political culture that’s made contributions akin to “buying the jersey for your favorite sport’s team.”

But for Democrats, if Trump loses, “it’ll hurt,” he added. “The enthusiasm may not be there to bail them out in 2022.”

Staring down a post-Trump world isn’t something most Democratic digital strategists are willing to entertain yet, aware that the election isn’t over. But for those willing to look around the corner at losing one of their most profitable boogeymen, one called it a “long, cold, dark winter ahead of us,” and another called it “the great looming unanswered question for every Democrat.”

“When you’re in power, it is very hard to fundraise, especially when you lose the motivation of getting the bad guy out of his seat,” said Rosen, the Democratic strategist. “We’ll start with better email lists and more donors with a history of giving than ever before, but yes, I am preparing incumbents for what’s ahead.”

The organization is listed hundreds of times on candidates’ campaign finance filings. It comes up as the source of more than $4,800 in campaign cash for Rep. Betty McCollum; $36,000 for Ilhan Omar; nearly $104,000 for Dan Feehan, $106,000 for Sen. Tina Smith and nearly $150,000 for Angie Craig. For some candidates, ActBlue accounts for 20 percent or more of money raised.

Yet what shows up on reports looking like interest group dollars is actually something different: money from a web-based platform that’s funneling an unprecedented amount of cash from individual donors to Democratic candidates this year.

Twenty years ago, candidates running for political office had fewer options for raising the money they needed to run a credible campaign — besides holding fancy fundraisers and spending hours on the phone asking deep-pocket donors for contributions.

That started to change around 2003, when political candidates began to harness the power of the post-hamster dance, pre-Facebook Internet to reach a broader range of donors. In the 2004 presidential primaries, Howard Dean used “the Net” to outraise all of his Democratic opponents.

The same year, two twentysomething whiz kids, Matt DeBergalis and Ben Rahn, founded ActBlue, a nonprofit online platform designed to help Democratic candidates and progressive nonprofits raise money. The organization made nascent Internet fundraising easy, serving as a relatively cheap, one-stop conduit for getting money from people’s wallets into campaigns.

“Online payment companies like banks or PayPal aren’t a great solution [for campaigns],” said David Nickerson, a political science professor at Temple University who worked in analytics for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. “They’re not set up to be compliant with [Federal Election Commission] regulations.”

Collecting money online also saved campaigns time. Before, the process involved sifting through names, addresses and the like to make sure a person who cut a check was eligible to donate. But the online platform allowed donation data to be exported easily for use in campaign finance filings. “It makes what was a painstaking task for many dozens of people something that can be done by a dozen people,” Nickerson said.

Charging 4 percent on every transaction, ActBlue was also affordable for campaigns, another feature that helped its rise to prominence.

In the 2006 midterm election cycle, ActBlue raised $17 million for Democratic candidates, according to the Boston Globe and before long, it had become something of a de-facto online fundraising tool for Democrats. Today, what started as a platform for national candidates has expanded to help state and local candidates raise money, too. In fact, if  you’ve donated money to a Democratic candidate through an email or campaign website this election cycle, there’s a good chance that money went through ActBlue.

Over time, the platform has added features to make it even easier for politicians to raise money: It helps candidates test the effectiveness of different fundraising pitches: Should you make buttons to donate $5, $100 or $200? Or $25, $50 and $100? And it allows donors to save their information so they can donate with very few clicks after they’ve set up an account.

This election cycle, ActBlue has so far helped Democrats and progressive causes raise more than $1 billion, a record, said Caleb Cade, a spokesman for ActBlue. The organization expects to raise $1.5 billion — double its 2016 haul — by the end of the year.

Some say ActBlue offers a big advantage for Democrats. Cade said grassroots fundraising was one reason Democratic candidate Danny O’Connor could compete with Republican Troy Balderson in a recent Ohio special election in a congressional district that had gone for President Donald Trump by a large margin. Balderson ultimately won by a narrow margin.

There isn’t a tool quite akin to ActBlue on the Republican side. “Republicans never really built an equivalent to ActBlue, but by the time they were trying to build a competitor to ActBlue, it was obvious how much money there was to raise online,” said David Karpf, a professor who specializes in media and public affairs at the George Washington University.

One popular online fundraising platform, NationBuilder, could be said to compete with ActBlue, but it isn’t a nonprofit and works with candidates and nonprofits of all stripes. Still, Nickerson said, Republicans have no trouble raising money online. Or, obviously, winning elections, sometimes with less money in the bank than Democrats (see: 2016).

People who tout the type of fundraising made possible by platforms like ActBlue say raising money from small donors empowers ordinary people to compete with big donors.

But at a time when money from outside groups can dwarf the amount of money spent by candidates’ own campaigns, do small dollar donors even matter?

Sure, raising money from small donors online can be an advantage. But it would be a bigger advantage if Citizens United had been decided differently, reducing the amount of money in political races, Karpf said.

Crowdfunding platforms like ActBlue do enable less well-known candidates raise money quickly and early to signify to parties and prospective supporters that they’re serious. The money they help raise for campaigns also gives candidates a more direct way of controlling their message, since outside groups aren’t supposed to coordinate with campaigns.

Such platforms also help candidates raise money from people they would never reach otherwise. “It does tend to nationalize the profile of races in a way I think is interesting and fits the political moment that we’re in,” Karpf said.

Through online communities of interest, people can identify candidates who represent their values and back them financially. “Speaking as someone who lives in Washington, D.C., I get taxed without representation,” Karpf said. “I can go through ActBlue, learn about candidates I like and donate to them,” he said. And it’s easier than sending a check.

ActBlue is an American nonprofit technology organization established in June 2004 that enables left-leaning nonprofits, Democratic candidates, and progressive groups to raise money from individual donors on the Internet by providing them with online fundraising software. Its stated mission is to "empower small-dollar donors".[1]

ActBlue does not endorse individual candidates.[2] The organization is open to Democratic campaigns, candidates, committees, and progressive 501(c)4 organizations. Groups that use ActBlue pay a 3.95% credit card processing fee. As a nonprofit, ActBlue runs its own, separate fundraising program and accepts tips on contributions to pay for its expenses.[3][1][4]

ActBlue was founded in 2004 by Benjamin Rahn and Matt DeBergalis.[5] In February 2016, ActBlue launched AB Charities, an arm of the organization that makes ActBlue's fundraising tools available to nonprofits.[6] Both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential nominees, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, used ActBlue during their primary and general election campaigns.[7][8] Bernie Sanders' 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns also used ActBlue for fundraising.[9]

ActBlue reports to the Federal Election Commission all contributors to Federal campaigns, regardless of the amount.[10] When a candidate for a Federal election raises money through ActBlue, ActBlue serves as a conduit for election law purposes.[11][12] All conduit contributions are itemized and reported. By contrast, there is a $200 threshold for reporting individuals who contribute directly to a candidate committee. Many small donors, whose names would ordinarily be shielded, are thus exposed to the public.[13]

ActBlue raised $19 million in its first three years, from 2004 to 2007.[14] In the 2005-2006 campaign, the site raised $17 million for 1500 Democratic candidates, with $15.5 million going to congressional campaigns. By August 2007, the site had raised $25.5 million.[15]

In the 2018 midterms elections, ActBlue raised $1.6 billion for Democratic candidates.[16] Conor Lamb, Beto O'Rourke, and Kyrsten Sinema have worked with ActBlue.[17]

In 2019, ActBlue raised roughly $1 billion for a wide variety of campaigns.[18] The Daily Beast notes that between January and mid-July 2019, ActBlue brought in $420 million, and that "According to the organization, that total came from 3.3 million unique donors and was dispersed to almost 9,000 Democratic campaigns and organizations, with $246 million coming in the second quarter alone."[19]

In 2020, several fundraising records were broken. In the week following the murder of George Floyd, on May 31, over $19 million was raised, the highest single-day total so far that year. On June 1, that yearly record was again broken with $20 million in donations. Over half of donations in the week following the killing went to charitable (non-political) causes, including one ActBlue page devoted to a bail fund which raised over $1.5 million from over 20,000 donors.[20] In the day following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, over $30 million was donated through ActBlue, again breaking the single-day fundraising record.[21]

In 2022, ActBlue brought in $20.6 million on the day the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.[22]

In 2023, ActBlue announced that it was laying off roughly 17 percent of its staff as part of what the group said was a "restructuring" that would help ensure "long-term financial sustainability." ActBlue said the staff reductions would primarily impact the non-technical sector, allowing the organization to hire "technical and specialized roles."[23]

In 2019, the Republican Party created WinRed to similarly support Republican organizations and causes with small-donor fundraising.[24]