By the time the 2024 election cycle ends, Democrats will have raised more than $15 billion online, ever since the first internet fundraising boom twenty years ago. As someone who began their career in online organizing at the dawn of the internet era, Chief Policy Advisor for Bernie Sanders Ari Rabin-Havt has spent a lot of time looking back on those decades – gloating about successes. But he has a confession: they messed it up.

 

I have a confession, however: we messed it up. 

At the beginning, online organizers in the United States talked about the need to develop deep and meaningful relationships with the members on our lists. We emphasized that by not treating the people we were emailing simply as rows of entries in a database, or as ATM machines, we could count on their support, activism, and their dollars for years to come. 

 

Growing our lists was about establishing real, honest relationships – and our emails had to  be meaningful expressions of organizational needs. If we had asked a supporter to take an action – even one as basic as signing a petition – we would always report back a result. If a campaign was successful, we would celebrate this outcome with our list members. Failures were also opportunities: for growth, and continued action. 

 

As online fundraising grew, so did the pressure to raise ever-increasing amounts of money. Organizational and campaign budgets, to which online contributions initially had been a new, extra source of revenue, became ever more reliant on those online donors. Online campaigners began to see their success and sometimes their continued employment as something based solely on their ability to grow email lists at a rapid pace. 

 

This is how shortcuts became the norm: instead of growing their contact lists through solid online organizing, organizations began simply purchasing names. Instead of treating relationships with the people on their lists as sacrosanct, they swapped email addresses and cell phone numbers with organizations targeting similar people, thus diluting their individual value. 

 

From that point on, signing up for a single email list could lead someone to receive emails and texts from hundreds of organizations and campaigns they had never subscribed to. 

 

For progressive groups in the United States, the situation turned into an example of a “Tragedy of the Commons,” the classic essay written by ecologist Garrett Hardin and published in the renowned American academic journal Science in 1968. The concept Hardin presented in his essay is simple: imagine a lake with a certain number of fish in it. Humans living around the lake can survive on the food indefinity, so long as fishing is kept to a sustainable level. The moment one person disregards common interest and starts catching more than their fair share of fish, however, everyone else will feel the need to catch a greater number of fish, too – worrying they might end up disadvantaged– and soon the pond will be empty. It is an example of how individuals, acting in their own short-term interest, can exhaust a resource for everyone.

Today, the email and text inboxes of Americans are flooded with political spam. Fundraising online has become more and more difficult. Many stories have emerged this year about progressive organizations in the United States having trouble fundraising online – from the Biden Campaign, all the way to small nonprofits.

 

People have caught onto the fact that they are being treated as nothing but numbers on a spreadsheet, and they are tuning out. Online fundraising will not go away or die off, but our actions in the United States have made this form of fundraising far less effective than it once was.

 

But there is good news on the other side of the Atlantic. 

Our failure in the United States will not be replicated in Europe. Because of GDPR, there will be no actors taking the cheap and easy approach to list acquisition. It will simply not be possible to buy or trade people’s email addresses. The law requires organizers to treat the people in their database with respect. In other words: it keeps fishing levels down to a level sustainable for all.

 

When someone joins an email list in a country governed by GDPR or similar privacy regimes, they will only join that particular list. They won’t have to worry about their information being shared with a dozen – or in some cases hundreds of – other organizations. 

 

No doubt this will make growing email and text message lists in GDPR countries more expensive and time consuming than it has been in the United States in recent decades. But it will also make these lists far more valuable, and the work more rewarding. Messages will have a much higher chance of being read, the actions asked of members will be far more likely to be taken.

 

Email boxes won’t be overwhelmed by hundreds of messages from organizations members never even subscribed to. Instead, communication will be special. The measure of success will not be the amount of random attention drawn to a single email, but the ability to build long-term relationships: those real, significant interactions we envisioned all those years ago.

 

Europe’s pond will never be emptied.

This puts an even greater responsibility on you, online organizers. You will not be able to take the road of least resistance, but this is a blessing – given where we now all know that road leads. Your success will depend on the quality of your work, your relationships with members and your ability to create timely, creative, and meaningful campaigns for people to engage with.

 

One thing that I have no doubt about is that within the next decade, because of GDPR and because of continued poor behavior by organizers in the United States, Europe will have a far more active and even a more monetarily successful online ecosystem than the United States.