ActBlue Scraps Meeting With Practitioners Amid Turmoil

A group of Democratic consultants, campaign professionals and academics who pressed ActBlue last year to do more to protect donors from fundraising scams and deceptive tactics will have to wait a while longer to get a status update from the Democratic fundraising platform.

A long-scheduled Tuesday meeting between the group and ActBlue’s Communications Director Megan Hughes was scrapped this week, according to three people familiar with the plans. The meeting was scheduled more than two months ago after a group of 142 political practitioners and academics sent an open letter to ActBlue’s leadership urging the organization to crack down on “questionable” fundraising practices and “spammy” tactics.

“We had scheduled it more than two months ago for ActBlue to give us an update on any plans or progress they’ve made in response to our open letter,” Josh Nelson, who was a key organizer behind a Dec. 18 letter, told C&E. 

Nelson, the CEO of the ad platform Civil Shout, said that his group proposed rescheduling the meeting “sometime in the next 30 days,” but ActBlue declined to do so. A spokesperson for ActBlue did not respond to C&E’s request for comment on the cancelled meeting and any actions taken by the group to address the letter’s concerns.

“They said they would provide an update when they have information to share externally, but didn’t give any indication of when that might be,” Nelson said.

Challenges at ActBlue

The meeting’s cancellation comes at a tumultuous time for ActBlue, which has powered Democrats’ grassroots fundraising for two decades. The New York Times first reported last week that at least seven senior officials at the organization had resigned in late February.

ActBlue is also under investigation by congressional Republicans, who demanded answers from the group about donor-fraud prevention and how it prevents illegal foreign donations to U.S. political campaigns. Democrats widely see the GOP scrutiny of ActBlue as politically motivated. 

Nelson acknowledged that the Tuesday meeting’s cancellation was at least partially due to the fact that ActBlue is “occupied by internal strife and Republican attacks.”

To be sure, the complaints outlined in the Dec. 18 open letter to ActBlue are entirely separate from congressional Republicans’ accusations. It focuses instead on what it says is the group’s “special responsibility to play a leadership role in protecting donors from deceptive practices.”

ActBlue has already taken some steps toward addressing concerns about donor exploitation. Last fall, the organization banned several so-called scam PACs from fundraising on its platform. In an interview on “The Great Battlefield” podcast, ActBlue’s CEO and President Regina Wallace-Jones acknowledged that the platform needed to take steps to rein in what many donors see as excessive and unwanted outreach from fundraisers.

“The sheer amount of calling that’s happening is, for many, quite unwanted,” Wallace-Jones said. “And while none of it is coming from us, none of it is enabled by us and we certainly do not benefit nor directly solicit, there are actions that we can and must continue to take to tamp this down. This is a frontier of innovation that we are committed to.”