In the US the Green Party  faces two existential challenges.  

1. The Main Stream Media has a brown out on progressive news and information.  It is not hard censorship, like Tienamen square inside of the Chinese Firewall.  It is soft censorship.  You can still post about this stuff, just the secret proprietary algorithms will not give it much traction. All of the internet giants censor content.
2. In 2020, $14 Billion was spent on elections.   A lot of money is needed to compete with the corporate funded parties. 

Voters also have their challenges. 

1. It is very difficult to get trusted high quality information about world events. 
2. It is emotionally difficult to donate money to the Green Party, when you don't get anything in return.  Worse yet, you worry that if they loose, the donation would have been wasted.

 

Fund raising newsletters solve all of these problems.  Voters get high quality trusted information, and are motivated to donate money to the Green Party in exchange for such trusted information.

 

There are at lest 4 platforms I know of for publishing fund-raising newsletters.  By now there must be more.

 

Substack.com   is the granddaddy  in this market niche.  They popularized the idea.    There is no up-front cost, the software works and is reliable.  You can take away your mailing list whenever you want to.  Glenn Greenwald knows them well, trusts them, and highly recommends them.  I trust  Glen Greenwald, I trust the people who run the company, but I do not trust their business model, nor their investors.  They practice surveillance capitalism.  Whenever they send me an email, there is a clickable URL which takes me to the original article, but it contains a very long embedded string, which I presume is a tracking tag.  When I forward the URL to you, they know who sent it to you.  It is a violation of privacy and of the European (and now Ghinese) GDPR laws.   Of course they also have the problem that they are not suited for collecting the FEC required information.

 

Ghost.org is the open source alternative.  Many are fleeing Substack for ghost.   I really like them.   I even taught a free ghost class and released a ghost template.  Their software is evolving very fast.   They do exactly what a small candidate needs and nothing else.  They support both a newsletter and a simple web site builder.  They offer lots of formatting options. Both they and substack support a membership model, and understand that there are both paid and free members, and some content is available to both, and other content is only available to paid members.    What I do not like is their business model.  They also practice surveillance capitalism.  Even if you run their open source software on your server, it is hard to make Ghost  GDPR compliant.  And they also practice nickel-and-dime capitalism.  Every additional functionality costs money from a commercial vendor, or you have to write it yourself. 

 

Revue was acquired by Twitter and is being integrated into their web site. Revue has rich formatting and lots of nice features.  In particular it is easy to import content from Twitter or from an RSS news Feed.  But I do not trust twitter.  There is now plenty of evidence that they censor content.    I wanted to make sure that my readers saw all of my content, so I numbered my tweets, and my direct messages.  That way a friend or reader could audit my tweets, to make sure that all were being shown to them.  Twitter deleted them, so I quit doing it.  Try it. 

 

CiviCRM.org is an older platform for publishing newsletters.  It is used by the Howie Hawkins campaign, and by the Indiana Green Party.  It supports both paid and free members.  But it is hugely complex to administer, and never really gained traction.

 

Sending emails and collecting money is not rocket science.  By now there must be many platforms which do this. Where the innovation lies would be in the political party becoming the media.  Fortunately SubStack has paved the way for this proven "business" model.   it is inevitable that progressive political parties will eventually copy this proven strategy.

 

 

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