I went and visited my 2nd grader's school today, one of those teacher-parent things where you get to see how where your kid lives half the day. So today's a good day to be schooled. I got a call around noon from a reporter asking me what I thought about Ron Paul having already raised $1.8M for the day. What?!? was my first response ["Damn. Wow. Um, that's pretty awesome," actually]. I recall coming by the Nov 5th site a few weeks past, but forgot about it until today.

I remember with DeanForAmerica, we had some fantastic days of fundraising around $1M in a single day during 2003 and early 2004, and I remember McCain logging in with a couple of 1M days after his stunning upset of Bush in NH in 2000, and Kerry raising unprecedented funds on a single day in 2004; but today, Ron Paul has shattered those single-day records-- Paul has raised over $3M in a single day over the internet:

I can see a lot of lessons in Ron Paul's campaign for progressives to learn (or remember), and some of them are outside of the realm of fundraising. Look how, as opposed to all of the current top-tier candidates, they are utilizing an inside-out approach to their internet outreach.

Our frontrunner websites, Obama, Clinton, and Edwards websites are much too inward-looking, and are walled off websites for the most part. HillaryHub-- if under-developed-- is a step in the right direction, the Edwards effort of blog outreach has been terrific lately, and Obama did early-on rocket through support on MySpace & Facebook. And in fact, fundraising-wise, no one could complain, but the Democratic campaigns have become a little too complacent in viewing how the web works, and can learn some real lessons from Ron Paul in doing outreach from within the candidate's website.

Look how, on his website, how Paul pushes his supporters out onto the social networking platforms of Technorati, del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Stumble Upon, and Newsvine.

Its a brilliant tactic, because rather than having to develop these costly platforms that take up valuable time, or rely upon closed vendor systems that use laggard technology, the campaign just uses the existing infrastructure built by others for that specific vertical. There is no RonPaul2008.com community. Instead, it exists out on the web, outside the campaign website walls. So rather than all their own supporters talking to eachother, they are forced to congregate in places where others that don't support Paul gather. Evangelize. Outreach.

And the way Paul's campaign has done it, by not setting up a social networking account on every new-fangled socnet site, but by targeting a few and then expanding, is also the way to go. The Paul campaign recognizes decentralized, organic signs of Paul community, and then officially sanctions the congregation through post links on their website-- start going here. The Paul campaign didn't directly create ThisNovember5th.com, but they did create embrace the environment where it could happen.

Update [2007-11-5 22:45:31 by Jerome Armstrong]: Paul has now broken the both on and offline combined single-day record for Republicans:

Update [2007-11-6 0:4:50 by Jerome Armstrong]: It looks like Ron Paul will bank over $4.2M in a single-day from online contributions, but Paul will have to settle for the primary record for online fundraising in a day. The most successful online fundraising day ever is John Kerry's $5.7 million on the day he accepted the Democratic nomination in 2004. Clinton holds the record for raising the most in a single day overall, raising $6.2 million on June 30, 2007.

Update [2007-11-6 11:30:15 by Jerome Armstrong]:The total wound up being a single-day haul of $4.34 million dollars for Ron Paul.

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