Obama Online - The Whole Kit and Kaboodle

The Washington post got the scoop on the official numbers regarding president elect Barack Obama's online efforts. Members of Obamas online team, called the Triple O, sat down with The Washington Post and dished the details. So, the numbers are finally out and they are bound to permanently change the way political campaigning and fund raising are done:

• Timespan = 21 months
• 3 million individual online donors (many of whom contributed more than once).
  
• 6.5 million donations made online (6 million of which were $100 or less).
  
• $80 = the average online donation.
• > $500,000,000 = sum of online contributions. (Out of a total of >$640 mil.)

How effective was My.BarackObama.com? Check this out:

• 8,000 web based affinity groups.
• 50,000 local events
• 1.5 million web volunteers
• Unique visitors: 34,024,584
  

These numbers are astounding. It wasn't just the Obama website alone that made this happen. There was tremendous activity all across the social web that acted as an all star supporting cast. Here are some numbers on that:

• Twitter: 122,513 followers and 263 updates.
• Facebook: 3,181,790 supporters
• MySpace Friends: 1,013,121
• YouTube: 114,060,747 cumulative video viewership
• Technorati Results: 788,968
• Google Results for "Barack Obama": 45,700,000

You might be wondering what kind of investment it took to get those kinds of numbers. Well, here ya go:

• $7.97 mllion = amount spent on online advertising before november. (primarily search, ad networks, social networks, local tv sites, newspaper sites, and NBA.com.
• $3.5 million on Google search in OCTOBER ALONE.
• $467,000 went to Facebook in 2008 ($370,000 in September alone).
• Blue State Digital, the company that built the obama site, earned $2,123,402 throughout the course of the campaign.

Here are some fun stats derived from the numbers I just laid out there:

• Barack Obama's online ROI: 6250%
• If $3.5 million was spent on Google SEM in October alone, and most of Obama's campaign funds were raised before October, that means the ROI is considerably higher.
• Conversion Rate (Visitors divided by contributors) = 19%.
  

If you are itnerested for some more in depth knowledge regarding Obama's online efforts, check out these great resources for additional information:

• www.opensecrets.org
• www.techpresident.com
• www.personaldemocracy.com

This is the team that made that all possible, from left to right:

Nikki Sutton, Joe Rospars, Chris Hughes, Kate Albright-Hanna, Scott Goodstein and Sam Graham-Felsen