Politics

Take Transparency Offline?and into Your Mailbox

By Nicole Aro

Election season is in high gear, as you’ve no doubt noticed. With it comes the normal barrage of ads, phone calls, door knocks, and big pieces of glossy mail telling you who to vote for and why you should vote. Organizers and strategists on hundreds of campaigns across the country are frantically trying to figure out the best way, whether online or offline, to get you out to vote for their candidate. What they don?t tell you (or your potentially less politically aware friends and family) is who?s funding all of those campaign efforts to get you to vote, and who those candidates will be listening to after the polls close in eight days.

Introducing the Influence Explorer Postcard. If you?ve used Influence Explorer before, it?ll look pretty familiar. The Influence Explorer Postcard lets you choose which candidate to highlight and displays the top contributors and contributing industries to that candidate or candidates on a postcard. You can even opt to choose both candidates in a given race for side-by-side comparison. Then, from the comfort of your home computer, polish off your postcard with a personal note to a friend or family member that you want to clue in about who has the real influence is this election before your friends vote, preview the card and hit send. No post office visits or stamps required.

This is a cool way to make sure that at least one piece of mail your friends get over the next eight days amidst the flood of campaign messaging is meaningful and transparent. And if you?re snail-mail challenged like me, this is a great way to make an offline impact online.

Business note: sadly, direct mail isn’t free. The cost of production for this postcard is $2.00, which you can pay using an Amazon account right from the site. If, like us, you?re excited about the ability to take your online impact offline, the opportunity to shine a light on the influence of money in politics to those who matter most to you, or you just like Sunlight and want to help us out, we ask that you chip in one extra dollar to help us hit our goal of 1,500 new small donors before the end of this year. (We?re currently at just over 500 thanks to the generosity of many of you who have given so far). Given the overwhelming amount of money being spent on the midterms this year, we hope an extra dollar isn?t too much to pay to help make this election just a little more transparent.

Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments.

Full post as published by Sunlight Foundation on October 25, 2010 (boomark / email).