More Youtube

I thought I'd create some new youtube graphs that focus on Q4... these are much more interesting :)







Some good stuff on Leno! Hopefully we'll see the effect of that throughout the day today. Last day of the month... There's no time like the present!

Bombs Away

Today is the 2nd Money Bomb Event from 1pm to 2pm... It's also the Ron Paul Jay Leno appearance! I will mark these events on this graph as they happen.



UPDATE: Not bad! around $25k in an hour... and some of the ramp up just prior to the event, may or may not be attributable as well. It's obviously impossible to say what the actual impact of these events on the bottom line is. One thing I can say with certainty, is that they sure are fun to watch. Now it's time to wait and see what millions of viewers will do (if anything) after seeing Ron Paul (many for the first time) tonight on the Late Show. I'm hoping that appearing next to the Sex Pistols and Tom Cruise will bring some extra viewers... even if we get .5% of the Leno viewers to join The Revolution and pony up some cash, I would think we'd see some real movement in the numbers.. Keep an eye on it, I know I will be.

Eventful, Youtube and the other candidates.

Most of this has been done in other places... but now I'm doing it too! (Thanks to Duff at Among These)

The Youtube graphs I added yesterday now have some of the other candidates on them. The only interesting thing is the average number of channel views per subscribed user... it's around 3 times higher than any other candidate... for Barack Obama.... weird.

Here are some eventful graphs:

Youtube Graphs

Thanks to the fine work by Duff over at Among These we now have some Youtube graphs:

On MoneyBombs and November 5th

I just want to reiterate that I think these events are important and really do show the power of the grassroots... Over 10,000 people have spontaneously organized to form what will surely be one of the highlights of this campaign. This is an obvious example of the community filling a perceived need... be it the need for short term goals, exciting community events, or what have you.

That said... With the extremely pressing nature of the primaries and all the MAJOR purchases the campaign needs to make in the meantime (TV ad production, air time purchases, event organization, etc). We cannot forget that our actions can have a negative impact, even when done for the best of intentions. There are 10 days until November 5th... that is 10% of the quarter and almost 15% of the time until the first primary. Every day this quarter is absolutely critical to this campaign's success. Decisions must be made based on money in the bank, not money coming next month. If you can afford to donate now PLEASE do so. If you are holding off donating and have the money ready, please consider at least splitting your donation and giving some of it now.

These money bomb events WILL be successful. There will be press, there will be massively increased donations, and it will be fun and really cool to watch. But at our current rate of donation we will barely beat week #1 of the quarter in the total raised this week. I think it's worth losing a couple hundred thousand dollars off our November 5th total to ensure that we don't have nearly two weeks of below average donations.

I am NOT a November 5th or a money bomb hater.. I have helped these efforts with graphs and publicity on multiple occasions and will continue to do so. I also realize that there are many factors at play on the current donations and the money bomb is probably a relatively minor piece of the whole puzzle. But it's a piece WE control.

I am planning on donating on the fifth, partially because I'm broke for this month :) but I came up with another $25 for today.



Please make your most generous donation.

No More Spike

I've spent the last day reading everyone's emails and comments on The Spike... It's clear that people Like The Spike from the poll I ran. However, I've decided to remove the spike for the following reasons:

1) This spike gives people (including myself) a false sense of accomplishment. We're on track for the worst week since the first week of the quarter! The spike obscures that fact.

2) The spike has rendered many of the graphs useless for the kind of analysis I'm interested in. Daily and weekly comparisons mean little when we have a cluster of temporally separate donations inserted into the time line all at once.

3) This spike represents about 3 weeks of off-line fundraising but it's impossible to know the rate of growth, or the effects of external events.

These facts make this new data extremely boring to me. I couldn't be happier the campaign raised this additional $430k, but I think it has little to do with what I'm trying to do here.

SO, what I have done is remove the off-line donations from the data that I use to generate the graphs. All graphs do NOT include this data unless otherwise noted. Graphs which contain off-line data have "(on+off)" in the title and their descriptions also indicated the data used. I am keeping the off-line donations as part of the text totals.... "total at last update", "total this morning" "amount needed per day", etc..

So, I think I have preserved the original intent of this site as a fairly accurate gauge of online fundraising activity, while still keeping campaign as a whole in view. Some people won't be happy... and nothing is written in stone. But I feel the compromises I have made here represent the best of all the differing views I've been hearing over the last 24 hours or so.

If you can only make one donation and you're holding out for a money bomb event... please donate today. The campaign needs your money now! They need to plan events and buy air time and they need your most generous donation today!

About the MASSIVE Spike In Donations

UPDATE HERE

I was contacted by the campaign and told this was going to happen. They have added in all the "off-line" donations ($432,000) into the online counter. Awesome! This is yet another ground breaking event.. This campaign is 90% of the way to complete, real-time campaign finance transparency. Other than the obvious spikes in all the graphs, everything around here should continue as usual... all the calculations will do their thing... Obviously, these are donations that were collected over time and not all on a single day like the spike seems to indicate.. there is not much that can be done about this.. I am not going to attempt to uniformly fold these numbers back into the historic data or anything... unless the campaign wants to supply me with more accurate historic data, of course ;)

Since the donor names, cities and states for these donations were not run through the data feed I use (except for the increased total), I have not captured ANY of that data. Which undoubtedly causes the effective sample size of that data to decrease further to some roughly 60%, I still declare it sufficiently random for trend analysis.

Before I get inundated with emails, let me assure you that I have no inside track to the campaign or Ron Paul himself. The campaign wanted to warn me about the impending spike in the total donations and to let me know they appreciate my work and find it fascinating. I was absolutely thrilled to be contacted and I'm overjoyed that they find it interesting enough to call me up! My status has not changed, I am not consulting, advising, or working for the campaign in any manner.

I have also added a line for NEW donors on the Per Capita Donors by state graphs... If the name already appears in the list of names for the quarter, it is not counted again. The existing per capita line on these graphs includes every name once per day.

As usual, I do not have the complete donor list from the quarter or any previous quarter.. so both lines remain approximations best used for trend analysis.

The total number of donors has also been turned back on, so I am enabling all those graphs... they will look funny for a week or two until everything gets back to normal.

UPDATE: Poll in the sidebar!

New Graph, UI Tweaks

By request, daily totals for the entire quarter:



I have also added a drop down box to the top of all the zoomed in graph pages that let you jump from graph to graph.

The zoomed in per capita graphs I mentioned in the last post now have a state table on the left to make it easier to jump around.

The 24 hour donor map is now per capita... sorry CA, TX and FL, time to let someone else be green.

Per Capita Donors And Some Odds And Ends.

Well... you asked for it.. and here it is:



Per capita donations for the entire country. Keep in mind, this data is NOT a complete list of all donors. I don't know the total number of donors... But my guess is that I have about 50% and the sampling is "random" for our purposes. It's at least as good as a Gallup poll ;)

I have also broken out each state:



go New Hampshire! (don't worry, there are 49 others)

The url for each state should be fairly obvious, if you seen one, you seen 'em all. But for your convenience, the state codes in the state tables on the donor map page are all links to the appropriate graph. You can also add them to the home page via the "configure layout" check box at the top of the page.

I am not adding all 51 of them to the directory page... because that would be silly.

Some other notes...

I have a couple new graphs for specific days, I think they help demonstrate the power of certain events on fundraising. I'm starting with some of the campaign fundraising emails.






Look at those suckers go!

I have added a new text table, like the one normally in the upper left corner of the front page, of some interesting averages... like average raised per week, day, hour and minute... as well as average numbers required to get to the $12 million from where we currently are. Again, accessible via the "configure layout" checkbox.. look for "Stat Table - averages".

I was also on this internet radio show... Talking on the phone, especially to an interviewer, isn't really my thing. I was nervous as hell... hopefully I only spazed out a couple times. I can't listen to it myself, but you can if you want...

There might be some other stuff I forgot... like.... what a great Monday! Wow. Biggest Day Of The Quarter!

What About the Other Candidates?

Well, none of them have a full time donation counter like the Ron Paul campaign. But Huckabee has put up a counter for the rest of October on his site... Once this was brought to my attention, of course I had no choice but to graph it.




I started the data collection at 1:20pm on 10/21... so as I write this there is only 40 minutes worth of data.

UPDATE: I have added a poll in the sidebar about this graph.

UPDATE2: Ok, as usual I ask a question and immediately make a change... anyway, I added a $0 for Huckabee at the start of the quarter and added RP totals to the graph. so you can ignore option 3 on the poll... feel free to change your answer :)

UPDATE3: this article was brought to my attention so I added $200k to Huckabee's total starting on 10/17... and made the RP data curvy again.

Poll Results

This poll was running for a few days... for some reason the first 20ish votes suddenly disappeared... but I think this results basically represent that initial set of votes.

I've got some more donor maps and stats brewing... I especially want to get something working that shows the recent trend of increase or decrease in each state... stay tunned.

The detailed graph descriptions are also in progress, I've got a new configuration mechanism I'm working on that should allow me greater flexibility in graph specific attributes and options. This will probably roll out next.

More graphs will pop up as I have new suggestions and ideas.

There are some interesting data sources out there... but many of them are things that are covered on sites like techpresident. I'm still looking for RP related data sources that update at least once a day and can provide interesting insight into the campaign.

I have some interesting ideas for social type features, but I think this blog is fulfilling an immediate communication need and it would take quite a bit longer to develop these features than some of the other things that people are really into. Anyway, these features are still on the list and interesting to me... but it might be a little while.

For those people who selected "different layout" I'd love to here your feedback on the current layout and suggestions for improvements.

I'm trying to think up a new poll topic... suggestions welcome.

A Unique Perspective

The Ron Paul 2008 Presidential Campaign Finances: A Unique Perspective
by Dan Bachelder
10/20/2007

In late Q3, and all but a very short time in early Q4 2007, the Ron Paul 2008 campaign placed a “widget" on their web site showing a running total of funds raised and a rotating list of recent of donor names. A few people, including myself, were able to start harvesting this data for the purposes of graphing and analysis. To the best of my knowledge this is the first time this level of transparency has ever been applied to the finances of a political campaign.

As the creator of RonPaulGraphs.com, I am probably in a very small group of people who spend more time than anyone, other than those in the direct employ of the Ron Paul campaign, looking at the fundraising data. As such, I've had a few requests to provide some more of my personal perspective and analysis. Even though I haven't written very much since I left college over 8 years ago, I figured I'd give it a shot.


The Data

I collect the finance data from the same source used by the “widget" on the RonPaul2008.com website. This data source is a Web Service, which is a URL one can access and receive a set of name/value pairs such as, total raised, time of last update, total number of donors and a short list of recent donors (including name, city and state). Every two minutes my software requests these name value pairs and writes them to a file.

The Process

Every 4 minutes my software reads the data file, generates a number of html pages and graphs as PNG images, pushes them to a web server, and the new files are immediately available on RonPaulGraphs.com.

The Graphs

I am currently generating about 50 graphs. Some of these 50 are simply different styles, flat bar graph vs. 3d bar graph, for instance. There are probably about 40 unique graph types, including “total raised: this week vs. last week", “total raised for Q4", “average donation size", and many more. Here are some of my personal favorites:

This graph is interesting because it not only shows the increase in weekly donations, but also how each day of the week compares to its predecessors.



As I write this on 10/20 we're seeing the strongest week yet with 2 of the best days of the quarter and the third consecutive “record breaking days" for Monday, Thursday and Saturday. I'll get into more about why that is soon.

This graph shows the total donated over the quarter with some markers on important events, these events play an important part in the shape of these graphs, which is also something I'll get to shortly.




This graph show the last 7 days, including today in yellow, and the previous 7 days before that in black. This is one of several graphs that allow one to see at a glance the current fundraising trends by showing both day over day and week over week comparisons.




Most of these graphs have donor counterparts where the values tracked are the number of donors as opposed to the total dollars raised. Unfortunately, on the morning of 10/20 that number was removed from the Web Service and those graphs have been rendered basically useless for the foreseeable future. I am leaving them on the site for historic purposes and because I hope they will resume publishing that critical number.

Events

Certain events have a very sharp impact on the level of donation, let's examine a few now.

Fundraising Emails. When Ron Paul sends an email requesting donations to his mailing list, the people listen. Note in the graph above showing total donations for the quarter. On the night of 10/17 a fundraising email was sent and the slope of the total donations line immediately became much steeper, indicating a large increase in donations. This increased donation level was evident from the minute that email was sent and for at least the next 36 hours.

Now look at this graph:




October 20th is special for a couple reasons. For several days preceding Saturday the 20th there was an ongoing of discussion on Ron Paul community web sites such as DailyPaul.com and RonPaulForums.com about trying to get as many people as possible to donate at roughly the same time (1pm-2pm EST) in order to send a message to the campaign and the media that grassroots organization is both powerful and organized. A web site was created (http://www.ronpaulmoneybomb.com/) and a plan came together quickly and spread through the community overnight. For reasons I will get to momentarily, I believe the campaign was basically unaware of this effort. Up until 1pm EST the donations for the 20th were moving along at a leisurely Saturday pace, even a little slower than normal. At 1pm on the dot the total number began increasing at an amazing rate, in terms of the graph, the line went straight up! The hour netted about $30k for the Paul campaign and the community organized effort got a big gold star with a little asterisk next to it. The asterisk is due to the fact that at roughly 1:38pm EST the Paul campaign sent an email asking for more donations for a completely unrelated effort (covering advertising costs in a new radio campaign) which was sure to cause a spike in donations on its own. How much did this email impact the “moneybomb" effort? I have no clue, but it's obvious the effort was going to be successful on it's own, given the steepness of the graph. If you look at the large version of the October 20th graph you will see a clear drop in the graph slope at 2pm when the “moneybomb" was complete. Although not as steep a drop off as could have been expected without the campaign email to add to the torrent of donors. My conclusion from this day is 3 fold, 1) grassroots organization works, and if the idea is good and popular it works at an amazing speed and seems to come together almost without effort. 2) The campaign is unaware of these efforts and has no control over them as clearly there would have been great value in allowing the grassroots effort to play out and rest briefly before sending an email which is known to bring out donors. 3) The Ron Paul supporters are far from tapped out. In fact, each campaign email, especially those written by Dr. Paul himself, seem to bring a larger and larger response, even those sent on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

The Future

Stock analysis is often compared to a monkeys throwing darts.... Political analysis, especially this far from an election, is like giving the monkey a glass of scotch and a kick in the head. That said, I will now attempt to hit something of value with my concussed drunken monkey...

Ron Paul is going to raise a bunch of money. Not Obama or Clinton money but certainly “front runner" Republican money. His online total will easily reach $8 million and depending on exposure during the debates and up coming advertising campaigns they could blow by that number in December. How's that for wishy-washy?

The Ron Paul community will continue to be outstandingly spontaneous and generate donation and media spikes that will confuse and befuddle those who aren't neck deep in the community. There may even be some controversy about it. It's hard for many people to separate the organic efforts of the subculture(s) (if I may be so bold) that have sprung up around Ron Paul from the actual efforts of Ron Paul and his campaign staff. An example is the community driven ThisNovember5th.com web site. This is another “moneybomb" style effort (a la October 20th) that has the stated goal of “bring together 100,000 people to donate $100 each, creating a one day donation total of $10,000,000" . Ambitious? Probably. Out of reach? Maybe. Significant Impact? You better believe it. Have a look at this chart:




That is a chart showing the number of people who have subscribed at ThisNovember5th.com (indicating some level of commitment to this plan). As of 10/20 there are about 1,000 people a day signing up. Just for fun, let's say 300 people a day sign up for each of the remaining 16 days which would put the total at around 9,000. Now lets say each of those people only give an average of $50 (half of the stated goal) each, that's $450k in a single day. Almost as much as was raised in all of week 2 and more than was raised in week 1. This is a far cry from the intended goal (even though it could be, and very well might be, much, much higher) but it's still pretty darn impressive, ESPECIALLY because it's an event that was not planed with, cleared with, or discussed with the actual campaign. This is an entirely spontaneous and self organizing event. The most amazing part to me, is that it's not the first (October 20th) and it probably won't be the last (Veterans day?, Thanksgiving?, Christmas?, something else?).

This presidential campaign is in an amazing feedback loop of success, the message of the campaign is bringing in creative and enthusiastic people who do amazing things with the message, which in turn brings in more people with abundant energy and ideas. The yardstick for this success is the fundraising data which the Ron Paul campaign has left right out there on the table for us all to measure by.

More to Come?

There's a ton more to talk about... per capita donor distribution, trend projections, web traffic data, fundraising for efforts outside the campaign, meetup.com, intrade, and so much more. If this article is well received, I will continue to produce articles of this nature as the quarter rolls on.

Disaster While I Slept

The campaign has decided to remove the total number of donors from the feed... Of course they did this literally minutes after I went to bed. So for 8-10 hours RonPaulGraphs.com has not been updating. The data was still collected, but graph generation was failing from about 2:30am until about 12am this morning. Sorry!

This also means that all my graphs that have the number of donors involved (total donors, hourly donors, weekly donors, average donation size, etc) will all be broken and irrelevant for the foreseeable future.... Let me know if have any idea why they removed this information... It puzzles and distresses me.

UPDATE: I should also note that this missing data does NOT effect the donor maps here.

UPDATE2: I have removed all the graphs that needed the total number of donors to be useful... They are still out there if you have the old link, but they no longer appear in the all graphs directory or in the drop down boxes for arranging the layout.

UPDATE3: Total number of donors is back! see here

Saturday October 20th Money Bomb

Some folks have organized this money bomb event for today.. I have no clue how well it's going to do... but I put together a graph just for this day... it will remain set to 10/20 data for the rest of the quarter.

New Data, More Graphs... Eat It Entropy.

Got some new graphs for you.

If you haven't already heard. November 5th is a big day. Go have a look and sign up... the check out the graph:














I've had alot of request for more traditional Intrade graphs.. so here you go:














I read recently that 3D effects on bar graphs are just visual distraction, so I have created a flat version of the week over week graph (there is also one for donors):

A Map For Every Ron Paul Supporter

Check out the new per capita map! It uses all the donor data I have and is updated every half hour.

... and vote in the poll again if you can... I don't know where the data went, but it is gone... I swear I didn't touch it.

U.S. Americans Need More Maps

We got us a map! After the popularity of Patrick Ruffini's article about putting the donor data I have captured on a map, I figured I better do something before he steals all my thunder :)

So, I figured out how to do some stuff with google maps and I added such a map to the donors page. Give it a few seconds to load... it's a hefty page, but still not as bad as it was with over 7,000 names on it.

I'll probably add some more of these over time now that I understand how it works.

As always... suggestions and feedback welcome.

More New Graphs

39 total graphs now... here are a few of the ones I've added tonight... some have been requested a couple times.

That is the Sound of Configurability

If you have cookies turned on... which most of you probably do.. you can now click the "configure layout" check box under the navigation and enter configuration mode. This will put a drop down box above each "slot" on the page. Selecting a graph from the list will immediately update the contents of that slot and each time you return to the page or refresh the new contents will be maintained. Once you are done configuring your layout, click the "configure layout" checkbox again to hide the drop down boxes.

So, if you want an experimental graph or a meetup.com graph on the front page, it's now easy to do. You can also change the location of the "Stats Table" (normally in the top right most slot)... You can make slots blank... and you can place the small version of the official liberty widget anywhere you'd like.

In light of this feature, I will be bringing back some old graphs in the not too distance future.. Like the today vs. yesterday graphs with just lines and no colored in area as several folks have requested. I'll also be adding a page with every single graph on it as a kind of easy-to-browse directory for those trying to decide which graphs they want. I will also be deprecating the experimental and meetup pages once I have introduced this new page.

I have tested this on Firefox 2.0 and Safari 3.0. If it doesn't work in IE.. please email me and let me know... screen shots and detailed descriptions are appreciated.

Just Can't Stop Picking At It

The 8 day graph is back to 7 days... but really 7 days times two, because each day of the current 7 day stretch is in yellow.. and in black is that same day of the week, 7 days prior. If you follow me... I think this will probably stay.. it seems like a pretty cool way to go.

I have also added a link page. The link bar on the front page is just 10 links randomly selected from the full set of links displayed on this new page.

I have reduced the number of links and donors shown on the front page by 1 each, so that the spacing in the layout doesn't get pushed around based on random links and donor names being too long... that was silly.

More Choices and More Tweaks

You can now turn off the fancy image viewer thingy when you click on thumbnails of graphs. It should save your selection in a cookie and be set every time you come to the site. The default is to have fanciness enabled.

I have made some of the graphs a little sexier with more color, a little transparency and no decimal points on the y-axis labels.

There is now a page for alexa.com that shows a couple fun graphs from there. Comments and suggestions welcome as always.

I added an 8th day to the 7 day charts, so now you can see the current day last week and have an idea of what we really need to beat for a target.

I have made several other small tweaks to look and feel, like removing the text header above each graph in favor of a title in the image itself. I have also improved the navigation bar at the top of the page and it should now show you which section you are on, in case you get lost :)

UPDATE: I made the yesterday vs today graph a three day thing.... what do you think? I'm not sure...

Flash Widget Surprise

You can now enable the flash widget on the front page. It is disabled by default. You have the choice of a small or large widget. Your choice will be stored in a cookie so it should look the same way every time you come to the page.

I have broken the total 7 day meetup.com membership into two graphs one for actual members in groups and one for people waiting for a group... the graph is much more interesting that way.

Thanks for all the emails, comments, suggestions, questions and general feedback! This is a great and creative community with more good ideas than I can possibly implement, but I'll try my hardest.

Uh Oh, Are Those Ads?

Yeah.. I added some ads... If it makes any money... it will go to the campaign... I think it's worth it.. I hope they're not too intrusive.

I've added two new experimental graphs... average donation size for the last 7 days and number of donors for the last 7 days.

The "last 6 days" graph on the front page is now a "last 7 days" graph.

Layout Tweaking And Some New Graphs

I shrunk the official widget to make room for another graph above the fold. It's kinda small, but we all know what it looks like and the data is all there on the page. I like it better now, but if you hate it... let me know.

I added 7 day graphs to the meetup page... hopefully that will make that data a little more interesting.

I promoted the "last 6 days" graph to the front page... I think it makes sense to have it in a prominent spot.

More later.

A Little Love For Meetup Group Numbers

I've added a few graphs for numbers I'm ripping from meetup.com.

Check it out here: http://ronpaulgraphs.com/meetup.html

I also darkened up that yellow... maybe that will sway the poll.

New Home for news and some updates

I decided a blog made way more sense than putting the news in the generated pages of ronpaulgraphs.com... you can obviously now comment and subscribe via RSS.

I added a new graph on the experimental page showing the total donations for the last few days in a bar graph. I think this will make the front page... but I'm still deciding which graphs are the most interesting and deserve to be on the front page.. and which ones deserve or be "above the fold". If you have an opinion, email me, or better yet... comment on this post.

The chipin page has had several additions and I've made it much easier to add them on my end, which you don't care about, but makes me happy :)

The campaign is having a great day and start to this week and I think it really demonstrates the value of the charts which compare yesterday/today and this week/last week numbers. so... yay!

Here's what's been going on.

I decided I needed a place to let people know what's been happening with this site, so here we are.

chipin page - This page is a centralized location to gather up chipin.com and pledgebank.com fund raising efforts used by meetup groups and the like. the widgets are sorted by date except for some of the pledgebank items with mess up my layout :) If you would like to have a widget added to the page, please contact me at the email address at the bottom of the page.


projection graphs - the graphs that show the end of month or end of quarter predictions are now only showing 8 days of data.


traffic stats - boy... freedom is popular.. and so are stats! so here are the stats for this site since its launch on the first of the month. And THANKS to everyone who has linked to http://ronpaulgraphs.com!