If you are one of the 85,000 people who left your email address at the Bob Dole for President Web site last year, you may soon be receiving a message from another Republican candidate. Two Dole site staffers are farming out the list to GOP campaigns and to conservative and "pro-free enterprise" groups, raising questions about the legality, privacy, and marketability of email lists in the political process.
Washington WebWorks, formed just a month ago, is a private venture that aims to do with email what politically savvy campaigners did with phone banking and door-to-door canvassing: reach the ever-elusive voter.
"By 2000, it will become second nature to think about your Internet strategy just like today we think about our radio strategy," says Kathryn Coombs, a Dole political consultant who, along with former Dole webmaster Robert Arena and with the blessing of Bob Dole, founded Washington WebWorks. "It's very much a cutting-edge way of outsmarting your opponent."
During the Dole campaign, visitors to the Dole for President Web site - which was widely viewed by netizens as sophisticated and well-designed - were asked to fill out a form with their email address, name, geographical region, and issues they thought were most important. The site used cookies to recognize previous visitors to the site and customize the page for them. So, for example, if you lived in New Jersey and were interested in the environment, the site would tell you how Dole and other GOP candidates were doing in the Jersey polls and where the candidates stood on local environmental issues.
The site was popular. About 70,000 visitors subscribed to an email newsletter from the Dole campaign, 45,000 Dolesters signed up at the site as campaign volunteers, and 10,000 took out their credit cards and gave money. (The site actually made a profit of US$55,000 from these contributions, Coombs says.) A total of 85,000 netizens told Bob Dole their email address, where they lived, and what issues were important to them.
Now Coombs and Arena have the list. They're not selling names wholesale, though. Instead, for a price they will identify those on the list who live in a candidate's or group's geographic region. They'll also help set up campaign Web site and help craft suitable email messages to target audiences. Although Coombs would not say how much the service charges nor name its clients, she did say the cost was less than direct postal mailing, which is about $135 per 1,000 names, and more expensive than bargain-basement spam lists, which can be as cheap as $11 per 1,000 email addresses.
"We have very tight quality control over the list," Coombs says in a phone interview from her office in Alexandria, Virginia. "We want to make sure people's privacy isn't being violated, that they're not being hassled."
But some say that that's exactly how people will feel when they get a message from Candidate X in their inboxes.
"It's hard to see how an initial mailing to that list isn't going to look like a spam," says Dick Bell, a new media consultant at Issue Dynamics and former administrator of the Democratic National Committee Web site.
And some say that while it seems like a good idea, it's a bit unfair to solicit people - even in politics - for something different from what they asked for: getting information about Bob Dole.
"There's something not quite right about the fact that you sign up for A and you get B," says Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Legal questions hang over the enterprise, too. The Washington WebWorks agreement leaves list ownership in Dole's hands with the company "renting" it. Coombs says that Dole's stake in the business is "very small" and that he is not involved in the operations of the company. However, the question remains whether a candidate who collected information on an election Web site can turn around and sell it for profit.
"If it's being used for lobbying, it sounds to me like a perversion of the public campaign," says Jock Gill, a new media consultant in Boston, advisor to the Center for Democracy and Technology and former director of special projects in the White House office of media affairs during President Clinton's first term. "Maybe the answer is that everyone is doing it, but maybe that's not OK."
Both the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee maintain substantial lists from their Web sites. A Democratic spokesperson said the committee's list has never been sold, nor have those on the list been sent email, though the organization had not ruled out the possibility of contacting list members. The Republican committee did not return phone calls.
Using the email list raises practical questions, too. Some bulk emailers estimate the address lists degrade at a rate of at least 30 percent per year. That compares to a 15-20 percent turnover rate for snailmail addresses. So although Dole's list sounds impressive with 85,000 names - "the largest such list ever built in US politics," Washington WebWorks' brochure boasts - the number of active addresses may be much smaller.
And, with an unsubscribe option on all email WebWorks sends out, the list will shrink again once email addressees start getting hit with messages.
WebWorks' Coombs, who is just about to use the list for a big national email campaign after doing regional ones during the past month, says that the key to holding onto the list is maintaining quality control. That means no spamming, no direct solicitation for money. But holding onto the list may be difficult in a climate in which most Americans are wary of yielding personal information on the Net, and just as many are turned off to the political process.
"It's a slippery slope from where they are," says the CDT's Gill. "The approach to branding certain candidates today is like branding a box of cereal - it turns a lot of people off to politics."
