The new rules of digital campaign fundraising
Plus: The U.S. Postal Service’s new Jeopardy stamps are perfect
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at…
The new rules of digital campaign fundraising
The U.S. Postal Service’s new Jeopardy stamps are perfect
Here are the brands Millennials find trustworthy vs. Gen Z
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Scroll to the end to see: the melted wax Abe Lincoln 🕯️
The new rules of digital campaign fundraising
The world’s largest association of political professionals just announced new digital fundraising guidelines.
For the first time ever, the American Association of Political Consultants, or AAPC, released guidelines about digital fundraising for its members. Acting with honesty, integrity, and transparency is encouraged, while creating content with the purpose of deceiving donors regarding the recipients of their donations is against the rules.
The AAPC announced the guidelines last week covering topics like “data protection and privacy” and “donor relations.” The bipartisan group, which was founded in 1969 and has more than 1,700 members, designated a task force to put together the guidelines in April 2023, and its board of directors adopted them this May.
The guidelines require members to comply with local and federal laws and regulations, obtain explicit consent for data collection and processing, and disclose the beneficiaries and use of funds on their donation pages.
They also list examples of bad practices, like “Disclosing the funds will be used for one purpose and then allocating the funds to another function” and “Conveying false or deceptive information to motivate a donor to give.”
“The adoption of these guidelines marks a significant step forward for the digital fundraising industry,” AAPC board of directors member Taryn Rosenkranz told me in a statement. “By establishing these guidelines, AAPC and its members are ensuring that digital fundraising is a space of respect and authenticity for all users.”
Artificial intelligence gets a mention in the guidelines, which urges caution “when putting confidential information on generative A.I. platforms or tools.” Tricking donors is also a no-no. Using language like “final notice” to make a donation solicitation seem like a bill is a bad practice, as is “scam pac,” in which a fundraising solicitation just benefits a fundraising vendor. The guidelines also say you can’t call donors names like “traitor” if they decide not to donate.
“This is about more than just compliance; it’s about commitment to our clients, our donors, and respect in every interaction,” AAPC board of directors member Tracy Dietz told me. “These guidelines will help us align our practices with our principles.”
Like other AAPC guidelines, members who violate them will be subject to the group’s ethics code and procedures.
The U.S. Postal Service’s new Jeopardy stamps are perfect
Alex Trebek, the beloved longtime Jeopardy! host, has a sheet of 20 Forever stamps coming out in his honor in July.
The philatelic tribute celebrates Jeopardy!‘s 60th year on air, and the stamps will be released on July 22, which would have been Trebek’s 84th birthday.
Trebek, who began hosting Jeopardy! in 1984, the year the syndicated version of the show debuted, was born in Ontario and became a U.S. citizen in 1998. He’s pictured on the sheet of stamps along with a grid mimicking Jeopardy!’s iconic board of clues in white-on-blue graphics. Across the top are four categories: “Entertainment,” “Game Show Hosts,” “Famous Alexes,” and “Forever Stamps.” Despite the multiple categories, the stamps all feature the same clue: This naturalized U.S. citizen hosted the quiz show Jeopardy! for 37 seasons. And the (same) answer is printed upside down at the bottom of each stamp: Who is Alex Trebek?
The stamps were designed by Antonio Alcalá, a USPS art director, using photography from Sony Pictures Entertainment and hand lettering by Marti Davila, according to the Postal Service.
In his memoir, The Answer Is . . . Reflections on My Life, Trebek wrote that he would “like to be remembered first of all as a good and loving husband and father, and also as a decent man who did his best to help people perform at their best.” He died in 2020 at the age of 80 following a battle with pancreatic cancer.
The stamps are sure to be popular, considering the show’s long-term staying power. Jeopardy!, which has been on the air since 1964, is the top-rated TV quiz show with more than 20 million viewers a week, and it’s won 44 Emmy Awards, more than any TV game show. In fact, Jeopardy! holds a Guinness World Record for its 44 Emmy wins.
Trebek’s wife, Jean Trebek, will be at the Alex Trebek Forever stamps issuance ceremony on July 22 at the Sony Pictures Studio in Culver City, Calif., along with the show’s current host, Ken Jennings, and Michael Elston, acting secretary of the board of governors for the U.S. Postal Service. As with all Forever stamps, these will always be equal in value to the current First-Class Mail postal rate.
Here are the brands Millennials find trustworthy vs. Gen Z
Which brands are most trustworthy? It depends on the generation you ask.
A new Most Trusted Brands survey from Morning Consult Intelligence found that across generations, a few brands reign supreme when it comes to trust—Band-Aid, UPS, and Google, for example—but there’s plenty of generational variance outside of those big names.
The survey, which asked participants, “How much do you trust this brand to do what is right?” broke down brand trust along generational lines; but more revealingly, it also looked at which brands are the most trusted by each generation relative to U.S. adults overall.
The results are both telling and perplexing.
No surprise here, but Gen Zers are especially big fans of social media companies. Members of Gen Z who are 18 and older tend to trust social media companies far more than the average adult, with TikTok leading the way. The short-form video app has a 20.5 net trust score among Gen Z, which is higher than the app’s minus-3.3 net trust score among all adults surveyed.
For comparison’s sake, Gen Z’s most trusted brand overall, Band-Aid, has a 47.2 net trust score, more than double the Gen Z net trust score for TikTok, showing that while the app is trusted more by young people than older generations, it’s far from the most trusted Gen Z brand.
TikTok is followed on the list of Gen Z’s most trusted brand’s relative to all U.S. adults by Snapchat, Spotify, Twitch, Discord, and Instagram. Instagram’s parent company, Meta, which was broken out separately in the survey, didn’t make the list.
Other generations’ lists are similarly revealing, and at least where Millennials are concerned, might have you wondering whether all is well with the 28- to 43-year-olds in this country.
TikTok is most trusted brand relative to U.S. adults by Millennials, followed by Bitcoin, Meta, World Wrestling Entertainment, Red Bull, and, perhaps most surprising of all, Philip Morris. Though the maker of Marlboro cigarettes gets only a 3.1 net trust score among Millennials, that’s higher than the company’s minus-8.8 score among U.S. adults overall.
For Gen X, the brands with the highest trust scores relative to U.S. adults overall are food- or home-related, led by Bush’s Beans, Palmolive, General Mills, Ore-Ida, and Cottonelle. Baby boomers favor Procter & Gamble, Nabisco, Vlasic Pickles, Newman’s Own, and Ore-Ida.
Have you seen this?
Trump mocked for claiming he was ‘tortured’ in Georgia mugshot arrest. Trump has been met with a chorus of online mockery after claiming that he was “tortured” while being processed at the Fulton county jail in Georgia last August. [Guardian]
Fox News plans interview series with Trump Veep contenders. Think of it as a Vice Presidential edition of The Apprentice. Fox News on Wednesday will kick off a series in which its Fox & Friends co-hosts interview people who are on the short list to be former President Donald Trump’s VP picks. [The Hollywood Reporter]
A warning label for social media? Here’s what it could look like. The surgeon general called for a warning label on apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Four design firms imagine how it could work. [Fast Company]
This melting statue of Abe Lincoln was all of us this weekend. The artist, Sandy Williams IV, says the sculpture was meant as a reflection on Lincoln's abolitionist legacy. Now it says something about climate change, too. [Washingtonian]
Team USA’s Opening and Closing ceremony uniforms are good, actually. Like the American models and designers who traveled to France for “The Battle of Versailles,” the legendary 1973 charity fashion show, Ralph Lauren’s uniforms manage to dress for the fashion capital of the world while still retaining their Americanness in denim and Evel Knievel formal. [Yello]
History of political design
Harvey Milk campaign buttons (c. 1970s). Milk ran for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1973 and 1976 and lost both times, but he ran again in 1977 and won to become one of the first openly gay elected officials in U.S. history. He was fatally shot the following year.
Portions of this newsletter was first published in Fast Company.
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