How to NOT raise money online

Over the years I’ve signed up for every online political mailing list known to man as part of my job, so it was no surprise that I got an email this morning from the Brownback campaign about his candidacy for President. But I was surprised at how poorly executed the email was.

Here is a rundown of the major issues:

(1) The “from” address of the email is brownbackforPresident@cfourstrategies.com. I have no idea what cfourstrategies.com is and half of me now thinks the email is fake. When sending this sort of official correspondence, it has to come from an email address running off the official campaign URL – brownback.com in this case. Otherwise I’m going to assume it is a scam.

(2) The request for money calls in the email link to this page, which also isn’t on brownback.com. In and of itself, that is ok. Lots of campaigns host their donation pages on third party sites. But when the email doesn’t come from the official campaign URL, alarm bells go off again. The suspicion is made worse by the fact that nowhere in the entire email is there a link to the main campaign website. That is a pretty shocking omission. And the donation form itself only has a link to the Brownback site at the very bottom of the page. At worst, this is making me think this email is fake again. At best, I’m thinking this is a campaign solely focused on getting my money (no conversation here).

(3) When you actually do visit brownback.com, you are redirected to some long URl hosted off the domain t-worx.com. The resulting site looks official, but I half think it is a fake too since it is not running from the main campaign URL – brownback.com.

When you combine all these problems together, you end up with an email/web program that seems more like a Paypal scam than official campaign correspondence.