It’s been a busy year for iContribute, Engage’s fundraising platform. We kicked it off with a bang as the fundraising technology platform for Scott Brown’s $12 million breakthrough online, and are now powering fundraising pages for nearly 100 campaigns and organizations heading into the crucial 2010 midterm elections.

Today, we’re excited to bring news of an offering geared at making it easier for PACs to make a difference this year.

Through iContribute Slates, political action committees can now raise money for directly for a slate of endorsed candidates. PACs can easily set up their pages, pick the candidates they want to highlight, and offer supporters a chance to support selected candidates with a contribution of whatever amount they wish.

You can see this in action on Tim Pawlenty’s Freedom First PAC, which recently highlighted a slate of blue-state / challenger candidates, and a page supporting Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.

PACs are typically seen as closed door operations, where a select group of insiders pick the candidates worthy of their support, and checks to these candidates are doled out directly from the PAC treasury.

Net-savvy PACs are already realizing that candidate support doesn’t stop with writing a check. By unleashing your e-mail list and social media in support of a given candidate or a slate of candidates, PACs can magnify their impact many-fold. Last year, I wrote about how a single appeal from Fred Thompson about the NY-20 special election generated about four times as much in direct contributions as the maximum allowable contribution from a PAC ($5,000). With a solution like iContribute Slates, PACs can institutionalize this type of giving and get direct access to real-time results, broken down by fundraising initiative and candidates. Though it’s not the full answer, we’re hopeful that an offering like this will also help bring the right closer to the ActBlue fundraising model.

If you run a PAC and are looking to multiply your impact on your endorsed campaigns right now — please drop us a line. A program like this does not come without legal and compliance requirements, so you should also talk to your treasurer about what’s involved from a compliance perspective. We are confident, however, that this is now becoming a well-worn path, with ActBlue, the Congressional campaign committees, and a growing number of PACs embracing direct-to-candidate giving as a paradigm shift in how political committees get involved in key races in a very opportune year like 2010.