A week or so ago, Ronald Hansen of the Arizona Republic and USA Today included Slatecard.com in his round-up of companies on the Right and Left which candidates use to process their online donations. I was quoted in the piece:

Processing fees already may be viewed as an unavoidable expense as basic to campaigning as phone bills and plane tickets.

"Your average online donor is an impulse buyer," said David All, a Washington, D.C.-based consultant who last year founded Slatecard.com, which he hopes to be a Republican answer to ActBlue. So far, the site's donors have raised more than $5,000 for GOP presidential candidates.

In charging a 4.5% flat fee, All said he loses money on small donors, which is hopefully offset by the bigger ones. In any event, he sees the site as filling a critical void for the GOP.

"With online donors, the sooner you can seal the deal, the better," he said. "You're risking not sealing the deal if you can't donate online." 

While I appreciate the mention, I think Ronald missed some important points about Slatecard that I added to the comments of the post. Here's what I wrote:

Thanks for including Slatecard.com in your round-up. This a very important discussion to have.

Transparency, openness and honesty are just a few of the guiding principles we cling to at Slatecard.

In fact, that's why one of our first blog posts back on October 11, 2007 (we launched October 8) dealt with this issue specifically, titled "Transparency in Processing."

We're proud to be one of the most cost-effective online processing solutions for Republicans and while we're doing this as a volunteer effort, we believe it's necessary to helping give the Right the tools it needs to better leverage the power of the Internet.

One point I'd like to include is that while we may have only raised a little over $5k for Presidential candidates, we've raised well over $325k for other Federal Republican candidates and committees. In fact, we're proud that over 41 candidates have already signed up to use Slatecard to exclusively process their donations.

We're just getting started but we're making tremendous progress given the fact that we've only been up for six months.

Thanks again.

David All
Executive Director
Slatecard.com PAC

The bottom-line is that a processing fee for online donations will always be a part of the process. However, we're proud of our lowest-on-the-market rate of 4.5% regardless of what credit card a donor uses and the fact that we don't charge a per transaction fee or a set-up/monthly fee to candidates.

To keep this operation running - we instead rely on generous donations from you - the Slatecard community. And, as you know, we appreciate it.