Chris Crosby

I’m sure most of you saw that Barack Obama raised a record $55 million in the month of February, so I won’t regurgitate old news here. But what I find more interesting than the jaw dropping dollar amount, is how much of the fundraising activity is happening relatively under the radar. Yesterday his campaign made the rather boastful statement:

No campaign has ever raised this much in a single month in the history of presidential primaries. But more important than the total is how we did it — more than 90% of donations were $100 or less, and more than 385,000 new donors in February pushed us past our goal of more than 1,000,000 people owning a piece of this campaign.

My first reaction was “Wow! Go Baby Go”! Then my second thought was, “Wow! That’s roughly 900,000 donors we can’t track…”

The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) regulates that a campaign has to disclose all donors contributing more than $200 to Candidate. I downloaded the most recent FEC database and found only 84K contributors to the Obama Campaign at a time when he was claiming north of 500,000k. That means the vast majority of campaign money is originating virtually anonymously.

This raises questions around current Campaign Finance laws and if they will need to be revisited or reporting limits adjusted to adapt to current trends. My sense is that inevitably they will, but whether that’s good or bad for us is its own animal.

For example, last summer I contributed a whopping $25 to the Obama campaign. Should my Name, Address and Contribution Amount have to exist in a publicly accessible database as a matter of Campaign Finance Reform? From a privacy standpoint my reaction is “Not just no, but hell no”. But as a fan of Government Transparency, shouldn’t we be able to have visibility into the money flows of these campaigns? My answer is “yes”. So then, where in lies the balance?

The gray matter that exists at the intersection of Personal Privacy and Government Transparency when you participate in “public” activity will no doubt be the subject of much debate when the dust settles on this election. My gut says the issue will be raised from which ever side looses in November.

I recently realized that February 13th, 2007 was the 17th anniversary of my first day on the job as an outbound telemarketer. That means I’ve officially been in contact centers for more than half my life. Scary, I know. What’s even scarier is that some people reading this blog probably remember that shy, scrawny kid with the high pitched voice trying to sell Cititravel (a consumer travel service provided by CUC International as a private label to Citibank Credit Card holders for $49 a year

 
Needless to say I’ve changed a bit since then, and so has our beloved industry. When I started this gig, all outbound campaigns we’re manually dialed and managed from color coded labels that were stuck on “sales sheets” and “callback cards”. And things like VOIP, WFM, CRM, Business  Intelligence, Performance Management and Analytics weren’t even glimmers in our eyes yet.

Ironically enough, some things haven’t changed much. In February 1991, a Bush was in the White House, we were at War in Iraq, and the U.S. was in a recession…

On that note,  “Smile and Dial”

-Chris

Last summer I wrote a post about the book A Billion Bootstraps which led to Amy and I getting involved in Microfinance. Since that time, I’ve been wrestling in my mind with how to combine some of the most successful elements of capitalism with those of non-profits in order to create charities that are self-sustaining. The idea is to structure companies in such a way that they could generate their own consistent revenue stream by other means than donations and bake sales. The companies however would still be non-profit and targeted on specific philanthropic initiatives.

Well, long story short, I got a little distracted last fall and was never able to reconcile the concept in my mind. That is until I picked-up Muhammad Yunus’ new book Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. After reading this, its safe to say that the creator of Microfinance has done it again. 

In this book Yunus introduces the idea of the Social Business model which he defines as:

a non-loss, non-dividend business. Rather than being passed on to investors, the surplus generated by the social business is reinvested in the business. Ultimately, it is passed on to the target group of beneficiaries in such forms as lower prices, better service, and greater accessibility

Yunus’ first voyage into Social Business was a joint effort between Grameen Bank and Danone to offer highly nutritional yogurt at prices that are affordable to the poorest people in Bangladesh (great overview available here).

It only took until Chapter 2 in the book before my head was spinning with ideas about, not only how to expand this concept to address our country’s poor, but also what will be required to create a true Social Sector and bring the idea of Social Business mainstream.  Thoughts of creating Social Venture Capital Funds and working with Congress to create new and unique tax and entity structures is rather exciting. Expect to hear more from me on this in future posts.

I also have to think that the answer to America’s (and the world’s for that matter) Health Care crisis lies not in relying on our Government to push some type of “Universal” Plan, but rather in creative individuals creating a social business model to redirect industry profits back into solving the problem.

For those of you not local to Chicago or the Lake Michigan area, there was a recent upheaval around Indiana’s state regulators granting BP a permit allowing it to dump 50 percent more ammonia and 35 percent more suspended solids into Lake Michigan. Ammonia feeds oxygen-sucking algae blooms that kill fish, and the suspended solids in treated wastewater include mercury, lead, nickel and vanadium.

Personally, I was absolutely mesmerized that such a valuable and massive natural resource for literally millions of people could be so significantly impacted by such careless, and most likely oil-money tainted,  politicians (not to mention by a state that only borders a very small percentage of the overall Lake shoreline).

When this was announced, legislators from Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois immediately engaged the state of Indiana, the EPA and BP directly. Most notably were Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois and Representative Rahm Emanuel from IL-05.

I commend Rahm Emanuel and Dick Durbin for their letter to BP’s CEO, their appeal to the EPA and the Emanuel-Ehlers Resolution. They also launched www.ProtectOurLake.com and radio ads targeted at BP. These gentlemen helped stop what could have been a true natural catastrophe.

I found the entire process rather interesting and took particular note to the Emanuel-Ehlers Resolution, which was essentially a Congressional smack on the hand to BP:

Congress expresses its disapproval of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management’s issuance of a permit allowing BP to increase their daily dumping of ammonia and sludge into Lake Michigan

I will admit, that I initially had my doubts as to how effective “Congress expressing their disapproval” would be. To me, this seemed more like a public spanking than anything. I also couldn’t help but wonder where the other 19 legislators in IL were during all this… However, these efforts and that of the local citizens paid off and BP has agreed to not increase their waste output into Lake Michigan. 

We have participated in an open and transparent permitting process with the State of Indiana and obtained a valid permit that meets all regulatory standards and is protective of water quality and human health.  Even so, ongoing regional opposition to any increase in discharge permit limits for Lake Michigan creates an unacceptable level of business risk for this $3.8 billion investment,” said BP America Chairman and President Bob Malone.

 

As much as I applaud Durbin and Emanuel for their efforts in protecting our environment, my concern is that this is only a Band-Aid fix. What we need is tougher and more proactive legislation to prevent this scenario from unfolding again. Next time, when perhaps the “business risk” isn’t so great, the results may not be so favorable for us…

Government Transparency is almost as big a buzzword as Web 2.0 lately. And for that matter, you would think the two would go hand-and-hand. With all of the killer technology available in our information age, one would think that it should be relatively straight forward to get a picture of what our government does in return for our tax dollars and votes.

The sad truth is that it is extremely difficult to decipher anything that goes on in Washington, from laws that are passed to how tax dollars are spent.

Jason recently pointed out an article on Why Congress needs version control. I think its a fantastic idea, and certainly serves as an example of how today’s technology can be applied to the governmental processes. However, I think we can go well beyond that.

I’ve spent the last several months scouring the net for what information is publicly available and from where. There are a number of government sites that make pieces of information available, and private sites that take those pieces of raw data and try to make something intelligent out of it.

For example:

• The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) makes available the donor records of everyone that contributes more than $200 to a politicians campaign. But who wants to download all that data and crunch it through excel? I tried, trust me its interesting stuff but tough to glean anything useful from it.
• GovTrack.US does a fantastic job of tracking every bill that hits the floor of the House and the Senate, complete with voting records of politicians. They even make it available in RSS feeds. This is cool, but as a standalone tool you can’t figure out much more than how many Post Offices Congress has named this year.
• Maplight is trying to marry these two concepts together and tie voting records with PAC contributions. That’s an admirable effort and I think with a little data modeling and consolidation we could use this as a starting point to gain some very useful knowledge.

The examples go on and on, and if you have some good ones, I’d love to see them. But the point is when you step back from all of this it starts to resemble a corporation, or “the enterprise”, with multiple data points and silo vendors trying to address individual application needs.

Enter Business Intelligence.

First we start with a data mart. We identify all the publicly available data points (there are far more available than I mentioned above), and we create a data model that does some cool things like create unique identifiers for congressmen and candidates and Bills that hit the floor, etc. It will take some leg work to get all of the ETL loads, or automated data pulls, set-up. But as the sites mentioned above have demonstrated this is not insurmountable.

The next step is the presentation layer. Once we have all the data and its modeled appropriately, the sky is the limit here. If built correctly, every U.S. citizen could have an almost real time dashboard on Congress, or run an ad hoc report on budgetary spending, or create a scorecard on their local Congressman, or… (more on these in a later post).

I think the key to this is to treat it like an open source project. So perhaps MYSQL and something like Pentaho are in order. This would keep commercial conflicts out of the equation and make people feel like they are more apart of the process.

I don’t see Washington creating a tool like this anytime soon, therefore we’ll have to take a step forward in doing it ourselves. Any takers?

politics

The blogoshere and news headlines are a blaze lately with articles on “Politics 2.0” and candidates harnessing the Internet and social networks to gain wider exposure and raise money.

But what if you’re not a candidate or PAC and you want to influence a campaign? Or make your voice heard to other voters about an issue or a politician that you love or hate?

Traditionally this was a difficult task. You used to have print flyers and knock on doors or pass them out on street corners. In today’s world, you just start a blog. Think blogs don’t matter? Do a Google search on “Pete Roskam”, the Congressman for IL-06.

The fifth result down is Dump Roskam, a blog “Dedicated to tracking Roskam in DC. This blog will show his policies and votes that are way too conservative for Illinois.” A little more poking around Google gets you to The Roskam Record, a blog “Committed to monitoring Rookie Congressman Roskam’s words and actions.”

In a world where, if you don’t appear on the first couple pages of a Google search you don’t exist, this type of publicity can be very damaging for a candidate’s image.

As a congressman, Roskam is up for reelection in 2008. Now, as much as I wish that traditional big media and 30 second sound bites on TV won’t be an influence in 2008, they will. However, as the Internet takes on a more influential component of campaigning its going to be tough for candidates to protect their online identity. (Just ask Hillary Clinton after the famous YouTube video that kicked off the 2008 political season).

Surely it won’t be long before a web savvy campaign manager creates a smear campaign by helping supporters to optimize their blogs and web sites for search engines and Google page rank. However, in the meantime, here’s to the Internet helping individuals get their voices and opinions heard!!

Ok pardon the bad pun in the title, but I couldn’t resist…

As I mentioned in my first post about politics 2.0, this is not a political blog, however I have taken a certain fascination with how the Internet and the “web 2.0 phenomenon” is going to shape the 2008 elections. As such, I will be discussing the non-partisan/platform aspects here:

I was almost finished wrapping-up the 2nd post in this series “from grassroots to netroots” when I received an email from Barack Obama’s PAC that I thought warranted discussion.

The blast was presumably sent to his email base with the goal to build awareness and excitement about his announcement tomorrow to run for the big house in 08. Beyond the “come join us for the rallies” there was a link to a 2 minute video clip (not uncommon for his campaign strategy).

What I find fascinating is that the clip didn’t mention ANY POLITICAL AGENDAS!!! It is merely a discussion about how his campaign will engage the constituent base, many aspects of which I touched on in my last post. It’s arguable whether or not the first 49 seconds of the clip stand for a platform in-and-of-itself, but we’ll save that discussion for another time and place.

I don’t have time to write about it here, but ponder just for a second what Barack’s cost per voter impression (I just made that metric up) is vs. traditional media (compared to say, Rudy Giuliani)… 

-Chris