|
Over at ActBlue there are a couple of things that inspire our team to innovate. I'd like to share two recent examples which highlight how we are freeing more information to our users and the broader online community.
The first thing that drives our innovation is the demand for new functionality based upon what we hear from campaigns and users. A popular request that we received this summer was to be notified of new contributions when they were made through ActBlue. That idea got our developers thinking so they built that functionality and expanded upon it, resulting in last week's launch of the Daily Notifications system.
A email will now go out to every ActBlue user who has access to a campaign report, has sent an appeal via the Spread the Word system, has ownership of a fundraising page, or has access to a partnership AND has received a contribution through one of those four elements the previous 24 hours. Because of that, hundreds of fundraisers and campaigns are now being notified on any given day about their donors, putting faces to individual contributions. This is actively reminding campaigns who's responsible for their fundraising success- be it bloggers, loyal grassroots supporters, or other organizations raising funds on their behalf. With more information, they can be more responsive to their donors and fundraisers.
The second thing that drives innovation is our desire for efficiency in gathering and organizing information. Occasionally we come across a problem that cries out for an automated solution. One of these problems involved periodically updating the database with newly filed Federal Democrats. To help keep us up to date, my colleague Nate Thames wrote a ruby script which queries the FEC and compares the current list of filed Candidate Committees to the list the last time the script was run. It then emails whatever address you specify in the code with the candidate name, address and committee ID.
Download FEC_Check.rb
This was released with the MIT software license so please use it to your heart's content. Be sure to glance over the script before running it, as it does have some dependencies that may need to be installed and variables that need to be set. Note: this script is being released without any technical support from ActBlue. Nate will be first to admit that he's not a formally trained programmer- feel free to edit and improve.
We'd like to continue doing our part towards freeing information and making it more useful. I'd like to believe this gives it added value and make it of greater use to campaigns, bloggers, and activists. As we work towards freer information, step by step, we will inspire a larger community of progressive innovation.
|
STATE BLOGS
