Getting FB Authorized • Alexa, I Want to Make a Donation • A Rare Beast: Bipartisanship • How do you stack up?

As you'll have heard, Facebook has rolled out a new authorization process for political advertisers. Since they class C&E as one, we just completed the authorization and figured we'd write a quick 'how-to'. It's super simple:

Go to the page you need to authorize (or Business Manager if the page is managed through that), then Settings >> Authorizations.
Scroll to 'Create and Manage Disclaimers' and click 'Create'.
Select your org type - let's assume it's either 'Tax-registered' or 'FEC registered'.
Enter the requested info (address, email, phone etc) AND have your EIN or FEC ID ready (for EIN you'll also need a PDF of either Business license, Certificate of Formation or Incorporation, tax registration certificate) and submit.
You'll receive a four-digit verification code by phone and a six-digit one by email. Submit those, obvs. Wait up to 24hrs for the review process.

Note, the info you provide will be publicly available for seven years. Pro tip with that in mind: don't submit your personal phone or email during the process.

This happened a bit sooner than we thought it might, but the era of voice-enabled political contributions is now upon us thanks to Amazon. As of last Wednesday, presidential candidates were invited to sign up to accept contributions via Alexa and the feature will officially launch in October.

So how will voice-enabled donations work? In a piece for C&E earlier this week, Democratic fundraising strategist Cheryl Hori set out to answer some of the key questions.

First thing to note, the minimum donation you can make via an Alexa smart device will be $5 (Democratic candidates fighting for those $1 contributions will have to take their business elsewhere) and the maximum donation via voice will be $200.

The process will be powered by Amazon Pay so as long as voice purchasing is enabled on the device, the donation will go on the card attached to your Amazon account. For campaigns, the processing fee is 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per donation.

There are certainly some legal and compliance concerns here, so campaigns should tread carefully in the short term. The potential pitfalls range from the less serious (accidental donation) to the more problematic (processing a voice donation from a foreign national, for example). One option for users, according to Amazon, is to set up a pin that would need to be heard before the donation is made, but that’s not a requirement.

This feels like the right place to remind everyone the FEC is currently without a quorum and very likely will be for the duration of the 2020 campaign.

We’ll end this piece by hopping on our soapbox: Voice will have a transformative impact on campaigns and evolve rapidly so it’s time to start getting to grips with the tech now. You should develop a voice search strategy for this cycle and be ready for the evolution of voice-enabled donations for next cycle.

It’s something far too many political professionals were skeptical of earlier this year, according to the C&E/PSB State of the Industry Survey. In the poll, just 40 percent of respondents rated voice search as either somewhat or very important for the future of campaigns.

Aimee Bingham, MV Digital Group:

Five tools my business can’t live without:

Zapier: Getting various applications to speak the same language is tough. Zapier makes it easy. This tool allows us to keep workflow at a high level while manual tasks get automated.

Chrome Browser Extensions: We use extensions like ghostery, page analytics, google tag assistant and fb pixel helper every day to simplify finding information quickly all within the chrome browser.

shape.io: This has been a game-changer. Shape automates pacing and is a one-stop shop for pushing optimizations and budget changes directly to ad accounts across multiple platforms.

Slack: With employees spread across multiple locations, Slack is instrumental in allowing our intra-team communications to remain casual, quick, and efficient.

Lotame: Off-platform data management is crucial in keeping our audiences flexible, scalable, and actionable across media platforms.

One app I can’t live without:

Spotify: currently on repeat in the mvmusic slack channel - Sunflower by Post Malone and Swae Lee.

A bipartisan group of 17 campaign practitioners from some of the industry's top consulting firms met at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. On the agenda: improving the tone of digital campaigning, enhancing transparency and addressing election-related issues such as privacy, regulation, and national security.

The outcome: a two-page jointly signed statement that comprises four principles that are "likely to receive broad bipartisan support and will help meet the challenges posed by abusive practices."

The funding sources of digital political ads on all platforms and systems must be made transparent. Voters are entitled to know who is paying for these ads.

In order to combat bad actors, requirements for oversight and disclosure must be made uniform across all digital advertising platforms and systems.

All political digital practitioners must never use digital content that incites violence or that is maliciously 'manufactured’ to intentionally misrepresent actual events.

Stronger transparency requirements must carefully target bad actors and not force unnecessary disclosure of legitimate competitive information that is strategically valuable to candidates and campaigns.

The meeting and the associated statement are seen by the group as a first step in offering policy proposals that are crafted by people who understand digital better than anyone else.

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