Obama campaign veterans launch hub for charitable giving

Among Jason Kunesh and Dan Ratner’s many duties for the 2012 Barack Obama re-election effort was a revamp of the campaign’s online donation system.

That’s where the campaign’s technologists tried to convert someone’s interest in the president into cash.

“We added a quote from the president (on the webpage) that said, in essence, ‘We need to finish what we started,’ … and that single quote raised conversion (rates) almost 11 percent,” said Kunesh, the campaign’s director of user experience. “We actually had to retest it because we thought it was an error. … That quote is probably worth $35 million.”

With their startup, Public Good Software, Kunesh and Ratner are trying to impart the lessons of the Obama campaign to their nonprofit clients. The premise is that persuading someone to donate to a homeless shelter and persuading someone to vote for Obama can be achieved with the same tactics, or that persuading someone to volunteer in a soup kitchen is not all that different from persuading them to knock on registered voters’ doors.

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