How ActBlue Became a Powerful Force in Fund-Raising

When ActBlue, the Democratic online fund-raising organization, tried to upload its most recent report to
the Federal Election Commission, there were so many contribution records — 955,475 — that the
agency’s servers buckled under the load. It took four days and repeated attempts to file the report.

That its monthly filing could tie up the F.E.C.’s servers — a feat previously accomplished only by
President Obama’s 2012 campaign — says a lot about the growth of Act Blue. Begun as an experiment
by two friends wanting to finance progressive causes, it has become a major fund-raising mechanism for
the Democratic Party.

ActBlue has led the movement toward small online political donations. As much as any other
organization, it has made such donations easy and common — even, as some donors find, addictive.
Because it’s flexible and easy to use, it has also become a platform for little experiments that gently
squeeze even more money out of donors.

“ActBlue is very cheap, reliable, portable infrastructure,” said David Karpf, a political science professor at
George Washington University who studies online politics. “It fills in very easily and very quickly.”

It took two years for the service to record 100,000 contributions. Yet it handled a record 130,000 of
them on a single day last month. In 10 years, more than $619 million has passed through the start-up on
the way to Democratic candidates and causes. For comparison, over the same period, the august
Democratic National Committee brought in a total of $1.4 billion.

ImageSonia ImMasche outside her home in Fort Collins, Colo., on Tuesday. She has made at least 3,000
federal contributions via ActBlue since the beginning of 2007. The average amount of those donations is
$10.16. “It can get addictive,” she said.

Sonia ImMasche outside her home in Fort Collins, Colo., on Tuesday. She has made at least 3,000 federal
contributions via ActBlue since the beginning of 2007. The average amount of those donations is $10.16.
“It can get addictive,” she said.Credit...Matthew Staver for The New York Times
ActBlue lets campaigns create web pages and emails with fund-raising solicitations that include simple
forms to make the process of donating faster and easier. By storing contributors’ credit card
information, ActBlue reduces the friction involved in filling out donation forms to a single click.

More than 445 federal committees representing candidates, parties and super PACs use the platform to
raise money. The committees pay transaction fees to use ActBlue, sometimes totaling in the tens of
thousands of dollars over the course of an election cycle, but in return they benefit from a system in
which ActBlue regularly runs randomized experiments to increase the efficiency of its donation forms.

Among its findings: Women are more likely than men to be recurring donors. It also conducts
experiments in fund-raising techniques, much in the way that the Obama campaign did. For example,
the firm noticed that many of its donors labeled themselves as retired or unemployed on contribution
forms. So it changed the form to allow users to check a box for these options rather than type them in,
which increased completed donation forms by 4.7 percent.