Missing Link on RPAC Donations

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According to Chris Poylchron, the 2015 National Association of REALTORS® candidate for president, only 25% of REALTOR® members contribute to RPAC (REALTOR® Political Action Committee).  He mentioned too once members understand the cause behind making RPAC donations they consistently will do so again and again.

Many make RPAC donations for several reasons:

• Donations support the lobbying efforts at the local, state, and national level to protect the private property rights of homeowners.

• Their peers told them to.

• They want recognition.

I think it would be cool if someone wrote a blog post or produced a PowerPoint presentation of the “57 Reasons Why it is a Good Idea to Donate to RPAC” and post it to SlideShare.  If you see one already out there please reply with the link in a comment or send to me by email.

So how do we attract the other 75%?

There is a large portion of membership that it seems difficult to reach.  It’s because they don’t check their email, respond to paper notices, or we as the association have not adapted to our members’ preferred method of communication.

If everyone donated $15 then we could have $15 million to take to Capitol Hill to fight for private property rights for homeowners.

When a member makes a donation to RPAC they feel good about contributing back to their supporting association and receive recognition by the local, state, and National Association of REALTORS®.

So the missing link?

REALTORS® post all kinds of things to their Facebook or Twitter profile that demonstrate their activity in real estate.

Why not post their RPAC donation to Twitter and Facebook?

The National Association of REALTORS®, state associations, and local associations each have their own payment gateway that accepts credit cards for donations.  Members must log in to the site to make the contribution.

Give the member the option to automatically post a statement to Facebook or Twitter that says, “I just donated $X.XX to #RPAC  Make yours today http://ow.ly/e4k45

Here are some possible scenarios:

1. A member can quickly share that they have made a valuable contribution to their REALTOR® Association.
2. A hashtag (#RPAC as an example) would create an online discussion on Twitter that will quickly show anyone who searched for the hashtag on Twitter would be able to see who donated and when.
3. Twitter followers of the contributor may ReTweet (share the update) with their followers creating a viral marketing campaign.
4. Facebook friends of the contributor would be notified with a link for them to comment, like, or click on the link to make the donation.
5. A Twitter widget can be created that would display all of the #RPAC tweets within a website or blog.
6. A Twitter List could be made under the supporting association of REALTOR® Golden R contributors which could be used as an extra benefit.  The Twitter list could be embedded using a widget into a blog or website.

The technology that would automatically integrate the payment gateway with Facebook and Twitter is by creating an application that uses API.  I am no whiz when it comes to API but there are several others out there who would could set this up for each local, state or the National Association of REALTORS®.

I don’t know if anyone has ever thought of this before but it would sure be cool to see someone implement a new way to attract money to support our association and their efforts to protect our industry.

Here are some other questions I have:

Is there an online database that automatically keeps track of how much you have given over your lifetime as a REALTOR® member?

Is this information publicly available?

If so can there be a system that ranks the contributors by:

• Amount given including those who have donated $0.00
• Local board
• State association

Hopefully these questions encourage some dialogue to increase the transparency of RPAC donations so we can promote the cause.