On Friday, the special election contest in New York’s 20th Congressional District drew to a close, with Democrat Scott Murphy edging out Republican Jim Tedisco by slightly over 400 votes out of nearly 160,000 cast. Tedisco finance chairman Tom Lewis has posted his postmortem on the race from the inside looking out.

Though the result is different than we as Republicans may have hoped for, the NY-20 special election generated new levels of online activism on the Right that show that the conservative base is re-engaging in poltitics online in the Obama era.

Engage was brought in to maximize the campaign’s online fundraising in the final three weeks of the campaign. Here’s a snapshot, by the numbers, of what the grassroots were able to accomplish in NY-20:

• $121,964 raised online from March 11th, when we started to Election Day, March 31st.
• $47,615 raised online for the recount.
• Over $214,000 raised online for the campaign and recount, out of a total of $1.39 million raised from outside donors.
• Over 3,100 online donors giving an average of $68.
• Two thirds of the campaign’s donors gave online.

The groundwork for the campaign’s fundraising success was laid early, as new media maven Ali Akbar hustled to get a simple message out on Twitter and the blogosphere: $20 for NY-20. This message was amplified by Newt Gingrich, who exhorted conservatives to donate to Tedisco during his speech to CPAC, spurring a flood of new contributors. Our activists were already motivated by a simple, clear narrative: take back a seat the Democrats had captured in 2006 in a swing district Obama had won by 3 points.

When we got started, we created an iContribute fundraising widget that displayed the total amount raised as part of our fundraising drive in real time, along with the names and hometowns of the last 5 donors who agreed to go public. We also believed setting an ambitious yet achievable goal was crucial for success. We started with: 20K for NY-20, starting precisely 20 days from Election Day. Here’s what the widget looked like shortly after the first goal was met:

It took just six days for the grassroots to shatter this goal. We wound up upping the goal three more times during the election.

Along the way — and after crunching some numbers — we learned some valuable lessons. They include:

Transparency Works.  Activists want to see the difference their efforts are making in real time. Something interesting happens when you go public with a goal — and show people the real numbers. Your fundraising appeal turns into more than an annoying ask and becomes a piece of interesting original content that people congregate around and can help shape. Though many would still have donated because of the overall excitement surrounding this race, we saw the numbers spike as we got closer to reaching a goal.The following chart shows the overall progression of total money raised in the three weeks before Election Day. You’ll see spikes leading up to the $20K, $40K, $80K, and $120K milestones.

And since the widget was a relative novelty early on, here’s a chart that shows just the numbers when it was first tried, leading up to the $20,000 goal.

Transparency is Popular. When given the chance, 77% of donors opted to show their names on the widget. Bigger donors were just as likely as smaller donors to opt for instant transparency.

The Twitter Effect. There have been many discussions of Twitter’s impact on this race and on online activism more broadly. Some have even credited this effort with raising over $120,000 “through Twitter.” We have some interesting data to share that might shed light on these assumptions.

First, it’s unclear how much money was raised through Twitter specifically, but it was more than pocket change — and well south of a majority. Some number crunching after the election revealed that about 14% of online donors were Twitter users. This is in line with the rate of Twitter usage we’ve seen in other online activist communities. Assuming these Twitter users donated the average, at least $20,000 was donated online by Twitter users.

iContribute gives campaigns the power to create fundraising tracking pages  on the fly. I created a personal page for my Twitter followers and used the link whenever I tweeted about the campaign. According to Google Analytics, my page got 757 unique pageviews and produced $1,280 in online contributions from 15 donors, or nearly $2 per unique click.

Another interesting example came on Election Night. Knowing the election would go to a recount, a group of us tweeted a link asking people to donate to the post-Election Day effort. 518 people clicked on that link, resulting in 11 donations, eight of them on Election Night.

For those evaluating the effectiveness of Twitter as a fundraising tool, I would say two things. First, don’t forget that e-mail — and walk-in web donations from people who are organically interested in your effort — will still be your biggest sources of online income. At best, Twitter will be a small but singificant share of the online fundraising puzzle, just like blog-driven fundraising drives that can raise 6 or 7 figures in 7 or 8 figure-online efforts. But don’t also forget Twitter’s essential role in distributing your message among key influentials who talk to others. The nation’s top bloggers, radio hosts, and TV personalities are on Twitter. If you can get an instantly peer-reviewed message to them in their most compelling and least crowded information channel, they will take it and repeat it to others, further enhancing the “surround sound” around your campaign or movement.

E-mail Still Matters. As an example of the point above, never, ever, ever neglect an opportunity to build up your list organically. By the end, the Tedisco campaign had built up a pretty solid list of donors and activists. An e-mail the morning after the election quickly raised $7,901 from 188 people to support the post-election effort.

Nor was the Tedisco campaign the only group to send e-mails in support of their candidate. An e-mail by Fred Thompson to his Presidential list yielded at least $30,000 in donations, as I wrote about earlier. This is an opportunity that most people with big lists and future aspirations miss. Instead of raising money for the nebulous thing that is your PAC, and then dispensing it $5,000 at a time, why not raise it directly for the candidates who need it most? Not only will your activists find the message more relevant, but added goodwill will be generated by sending a worthy candidate heaping gobs of cash above and beyond the $5K limit.

Online Fundraising is only growing bigger — not having a coherent online strategy is now like not having a direct mail strategy, or a high-dollar strategy. Campaigns have always been concerned about raising money, and for Republican campaigns in 2008, this meant wrangling the most Bush Rangers & Pioneers and sending the most spammy direct mail pieces, all while Obama built the biggest fundraising machine known to man one e-mail and one $25 donor at a time.

This won’t change with one campaign and likely won’t decisively change until 2012, but the fact that the majority of donors engaged online — in a campaign with many traditional elements to it — is significant.

It’s easy to forget that fundraising in Congressional races is still dominated by PACs, contributions from other elected officials, and personal relationships. Of the $1.39 million the campaign raised from outside sources, $845,000 came from individuals. Over a quarter of that came in online — and for a fraction of the cost of traditional fundraising.

One of the most astonishing — but also frustrating — aspects of online fundraising is that the money almost invariably comes in late, when activists are at the height of their enthusiasm about a race. Of the $550,000+ raised after March 11th, when the campaign filed their pre-election FEC report, about a third came in online. Of money that came in from individuals after March 11th, nearly half was online. When it mattered the most, the grassroots was there, expanding the campaign’s footprint right in the days before the election.

We won’t say that everything about this election turned out exactly as we’d hoped. But for the right, NY-20 was an awakening of sorts in the lost art of grassroots online action. We were proud to be there for a small part of it.