Via “TechPresident”:http://www.techpresident.com, this “story”:http://2ohreally.com/2008/11/from-each-according-to-his-ability-to-buy-an-obama-t-shirt/ about fundraising and t-shirts.
So I got another e-mail from Barack Obama. I get ‘em all the time. This one asked me for $30 to help replenish the funds of the Democratic National Committee, which apparently blew all its money exterminating the GOP. … I know the campaign is over, but I’m missing the fray. Besides, the e-mail says, if I donate the $30 I’ll get this cool Limited Edition T-shirt. … Okay, it’s a hideous T-shirt, but still. Funny thing, though: It turns out that a friend of mine got a similar e-mail today. But she was told that to get the same hideous Limited Edition T-shirt, _she’d have to cough up $100._ … It doesn’t take a political scientist to figure out what’s going on here. My friend made her donations in increments of $100. I made mine by letting BO tap my credit card for $25 a month.
This kind of generosity-to-a-cause discrimination has a certain economic rationale. But it seems to me nonetheless to be a very stupid way of raising money if (as here) there is a decent chance that people at the different price points will be able to compare notes with each other. My (perhaps flawed) back-of-the-envelope sense of the sociology of giving is that people are likely to be very highly sensitive to perceived unfairness in the allotment of tokens of recognition (even truly foul t-shirts like this one). If people get the same recognition for very different donations, then the perceived value of that recognition is going to plummet, and potential donors, rather than being motivated to give, are likely to be annoyed. That said, my knowledge of the literature on this topic basically amounts to vague memories of having read Titmuss 15 years ago, so I may be wrong … Kieran? Anyone else? ?
{ 27 comments }
Barry Freed 11.12.08 at 5:16 pm
As a traitor to the cause here’s hoping you’ve made it onto President-elect Barack Hussein Obama’s enemies list and shall be dealt with shortly.
Seth Gordon 11.12.08 at 5:18 pm
If I go to barackobama.com I get a page offering the shirt in exchange for a $30 donation. (I never signed up for an account on the site so I assume I have no cookie on my browser advertising me as a generous donor. YMMV.) But I’m sorry, if the DNC wants that hideous design on my chest, they ought to pay me.
CafePress has some tasteful “Yes We Did” T-shirts, but I have no idea if any of them are actually passing profits back to Democratic organiztions.
owl 11.12.08 at 5:19 pm
This isn’t new. The same thing happened to me after John Kerry, and it happens all the time when I get pleas from charities that I’ve contributed to over the years.
Misha 11.12.08 at 5:51 pm
The email always asks you for a donation in the sum of the highest amount you ever donated to them, which is a bog-standard way of doing fundraising, but even though the email was poorly phrased, when I clicked through, the T-shirt was listed at only $30 (only!), even though my top donation was a lot more than that.
Kieran 11.12.08 at 5:51 pm
A fundraising strategy (or any kind of strategy, really) predicated on the idea that people aren’t talking to one another is likely to go wrong. People are pretty familiar with fundraising where gifts are tiered by the size of the donation, too, so messing with that by trying to price-discriminate is likely to piss people off. (Yeah, yeah, rational people shouldn’t be pissed off because they were prepared to pay in the first place, I know.) My sense is that the annoyance would come from a retrospective feeling that the recipient hadn’t been up front to you about the terms of the gift exchange, rather than a forward-looking irritation that wearing your special t-shirt wasn’t going to convey as much distinction as you thought. But disentangling those would be tricky.
Righteous Bubba 11.12.08 at 6:02 pm
If you think of it as a tax on the rich person it’s most amusing.
KAS 11.12.08 at 6:06 pm
Yup, my email is $30 bucks (I donated $15 twice; the second time I got a great Obama mug)
KAS
Lokman 11.12.08 at 6:13 pm
Joseph Turow basically made a similar argument in his 2006 book Niche Envy, suggesting that tactics of marketers using digital databases to target niche audiences might backfire once they find out that other people get better deals.
Dylan Thurston 11.12.08 at 6:14 pm
I think your correspondents are not reading carefully enough. The e-mail I got offers a T-shirt for a donation of a certain amount, but carefully avoids saying that you need to donate that much to get the T-shirt. Then the web page offers the T-shirt for anything over $30 in the small print somewhere.
lemuel pitkin 11.12.08 at 6:17 pm
I think it’s smart. Knowing how much someone is likely to give and setting your pitch appropriately is *the* ky to effective small-donor fundraising. It’s exactly this kind of thinking that has allowed the Obama campaign to raise unprecedented amounts online.
The harms you describe are totally speculative — to my mind, the $100-t-shirt person is jsut as likely to be pleased that their larger dopnations were noticed & remembered, and they may place a greater value on the shirt for that reason. (True story: a friend of mine used to write for a left-wing magazin that, in one of its priodic financial crises, asked freelancers if they would forgive payments due for old work in return for some trivial swag. He wore his “world’s most expensive In These Times t-shirts” with pride for years afterward.)
And the reality is, in campaign work you need to push your base as far as they go, which means taking the risk of annoying people. One thing we always say when doing turnout calls — until you’re regularly hearing, “if you call me one more time, I’m voting for the other guy,” you aren’t calling peole enough. Similarly here: being squeamish about price discrimination would mean leaving money on the table.
MattF 11.12.08 at 6:37 pm
My T-shirt would cost $250. That did strike me as kinda expensive.
alkali 11.12.08 at 7:01 pm
The e-mail I received stated:
If you give $30 or more, you’ll get a limited edition 2008 Victory T-shirt. Will you make a donation of $X or more now?
(… where $X is a figure significantly greater than $30 reflecting the level of donations that I’ve made in the past, i.e., the “totally in the tank for Obama” level.)
That strikes me as straightforward enough, but then again I’m totally in the tank for Obama.
hermit greg 11.12.08 at 7:36 pm
This is like the guy who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. He agreed to give them a t-shirt for the day and sent them into the vineyard.
About 9 o’clock he went out and saw other standing in the Lowe’s parking lot doing nothing. He told them, “You go work in my vineyard, and I will give you whatever is right.” So they went.
At noon he did the same thing, and at 5 o’clock, he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, “Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?”
“Because no one has hired us,” they answered.
He said, “Get to work in my vineyard!”
When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said, “Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.”
The workers who were hired at 5 o’clock came and each received a t-shirt. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a dollar. When they received it, they began to grumble. “These men who were hired last worked only one hour,” they said, “and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.”
But he answered, “Friends, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a t-shirt? Take your shirt and go. I want to give the men who were hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own t-shirts? Or are you envious because I am generous?
So the last will be first, and the first will be last.
J Thomas 11.12.08 at 7:38 pm
A long time ago the US government did something called “Project Camelot”, where they ran some mail-in opinion surveys in latin america to find out what the sort of latin americans who’d answer mail-in surveys thought about a variety of topics.
There was a giant backlash, a whole lot of people were offended at the questions.
Some years after that a czechoslovakian spy defected and wrote a book about his experience. He claimed that his boss ran a disinformation campaign; they sent a lot of insulting surveys that claimed to be from Project Camelot so that people in latin america would get mad at the USA. He praised the elegance of it — their costs were very low and they had a big effect, far more than many better-funded russian projects.
After that I didn’t know whether Project Camelot had been damaged by a czech plot, or whether Project Camelot itself offended people, and the czech defector’s book had that claim added to it so that Project Camelot wouldn’t look so bad in itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Camelot
Could GOP dirty-tricks teams do a project-camelot-style attack? Insulting fundraising literature that purports to be from Democrats would be an obvious method, though this example seems both too subtle and too weak.
In general if you get something offensive it might make sense to check with the actual organization it comes from (contacted by some other method than responding to the address, phone number, email address or website provided with the offensive communication). I expect there’s more room to exploit disinformation than has actually been exploited yet, and the better you check sources the better it can be slowed as it ramps up.
Ben Alpers 11.12.08 at 8:46 pm
Think of the arbitrage possibilities!
Perhaps Craid Stolz, who wrote the TechPresident piece, could send $30 to the DNC, get the shirt, then sell it to his friend for $50. The magic of the market!
Obviously this fundraising policy doesn’t make sense, because, assuming perfect information, only people being asked to donate the minimum amount would buy their shirts directly from the DNC. [/snark]
Barry 11.12.08 at 8:53 pm
That’s just the start – here is the down-low on the New World ObamOrder:
http://www.236.com/video/2008/get_your_war_on_new_world_orde_10121.php
mollymooly 11.12.08 at 9:27 pm
They could just color-code the T-shirts: gray for $30, green for $100, gold for $500, and for $2000, pure deep blue.
Or pure deep black.
Or half black, half white.
stostosto 11.12.08 at 9:39 pm
But… Obama is a socialist, remember? The principle is “from each according to ability”. Henry is oddly ascribing bourgeois motivations to Obama’s supporters.
Benjamin Mako Hill 11.13.08 at 4:18 am
I think you are absolutely correct. But it only works if people talk to each other about the dollar values in their emails. People don’t like talking about the dollar values of donations, in most cases. I’ll bet a large majority of people won’t.
Anonymous 11.13.08 at 4:57 am
I agree with alkali above. The e-mail I got said quite clearly: If you give $30 or more, you’ll get a limited edition 2008 Victory T-shirt. Will you make a donation of $500 or more now?
Did anybody actually get a different e-mail from this? For example, MattF, what exactly was the phrasing of yours? My current guess is that in fact everybody got the same e-mail, with different numbers substituted for $500, and that they all stated that $30 was the minimum amount for a T-shirt. If this is right, then it’s just a matter of how carefully the recipients read the e-mail.
Zamfir 11.13.08 at 10:26 am
Is there really anyone who donates a minimum amount as means to obtain a T-shirt? I thought the T-shirts and mugs were more like gang colors, both to show you are in the team, and to promote the visibility of the team.
To put it another way, the party would gladly give those shirts away for free, except that people value them more if they have to earn them. Think ‘Crew’ shirts of events.
Knitting Clio 11.13.08 at 12:09 pm
Although I voted for Senator Obama, I gave no money to the DNC — yet I’m being offered the t-shirt for $30. Interesting.
Michael Turner 11.13.08 at 1:49 pm
That said, my knowledge of the literature on this topic basically amounts to vague memories of having read Titmuss 15 years ago, so I may be wrong . . . .
. . . *sob* . . . LEAVE ABI ALONE!
Oh, wait, you’re talking about the other Titmuss.
herman greg wins this thread, not breaking a sweat. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. Whatever might be said against it, the New Testament is great art that great artists keep grave-robbing.
stostosto, soshulizm might be “to each according to his needs”, but in the real world, it’s more like “to each according to whatever it takes to shut them up, so when you toss out your final insulting offer, try to say something that leaves them collecting their jaws off the floor.” And that seems more relevant here. You were cute, though.
Let’s pretend for a moment that this has nothing to do with giving gifts, and is just a market. C’mon, it’ll only hurt for a minute. I’m only an armchair economist anyway, so you can blow this thought of mine out your left nostril at any time.
Lokman notes an observation made in 2006 by Turow that actually goes back to the dawn of Internet e-commerce. It’s been said ad nauseum that the Web, by creating greater price transparency, makes price discrimination much harder. No news there. It’s been said (less often, by economists) that price discrimination is, in some markets, the only way to make enough profit to have a hope of staying in business at all. Transparency beats prices down, and a market of firms operating on razor-thin margins is unstable, very likely coalescing into monopoly if not for anti-trust deterrence, or periodic “creative destruction” from upstart innovators. Schumpeter even used this phenomenon as part of his dour argument for the eventual triumph of s*cialism, believe it or not.
Then there’s Peter Drucker, who said all organizations, even “non-profits”, need to store up profit of some kind, and his proposal that profit (in competitive markets at least) should be called “the cost of staying in business” instead. And isn’t a political party a kind of “non-profit organization”?
Now, if you Google “Austan Goolsbee” and “price discrimination” you won’t find him using the term, but you’ll find he’s done a bit of work with pricing stuff online and price sensitivity among on-line customers. So I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that he’d like to publish another paper or two before he goes full-time for the Obama administration. I mean, they’ve got all these t-shirt to get rid of anyway, and the storage costs for them. Why not do an econ experiment?
Are the t-shirts horrid? Irrelevant. Recall the scene in “Basquiat” where Warhol and art dealer Bruno excitedly shuffle Basquiat’s miniatures back and forth over the lunch table, like two children playing cards. When the shuffle settles down, Warhol complains, “Oh Bruno . . . you have everything that’s good.” Bruno hisses back: “It’s not how good they are, it’s what you can get for them.”
So I agree with lemuel pitkin: this is actually smart. But I also understand the offense taken by some as well. Still, Righteous Bubba‘s amusement notwithstanding, maybe you should take your cue from Joe Biden: considering paying the donation suggested, because . . . paying more when you can afford to pay more is your patriotic duty. You can always just burn the t-shirt when it comes in the mail.
stuart 11.13.08 at 7:38 pm
I expect there’s more room to exploit disinformation than has actually been exploited yet, and the better you check sources the better it can be slowed as it ramps up.
And of course if someone did this, there would have to be plausible deniability from the campaign that did the disinformation – it would have to look like a lone book depository employee running it all, if someone too closely affiliated to a campaign was caught organising it, it could backfire badly.
J Thomas 11.14.08 at 2:33 am
…. if someone too closely affiliated to a campaign was caught organising it, it could backfire badly.
Oh, definitely. Better if it’s hard to trace at all. You get a promotional letter in the mail that looks like it came from the Obama campaign or the DNC. Where did it really come from? Maybe good detective work can track it down to somebody who does misleading mailings for a living, who didn’t really know who was paying him.
Or email, even more so.
And it’s very cheap to run the fraudulent campaign. You don’t even need any t-shirts.
c.l. ball 11.15.08 at 10:54 pm
Price point?
Et tu, Henry?
c.l. ball 11.16.08 at 2:08 am
If you never donated, the message read:
The bigger issue, however, is how much money the Obama campaign has left.
The Obama campaign could transfer remaining funds over to the DNC.
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