This is a pretty basic distributed email feature. On Tuesday, the Obama campaign sent out a message from "Barack":

Peter --

Last night each of the presidential campaigns reported their third-quarter fundraising numbers.

The results are clear. We continue to build the largest grassroots movement in history, but Washington lobbyists and special interests rallied to help Hillary Clinton out-raise us for the first time.

If we want real change in this country, then we need to prove that together we are stronger than the lobbyist-driven money machine that has dominated Washington for too long.

The situation here is simple. We are $2.1 million behind. We must close that gap right now. I need you to make a donation of $*****:

https://donate.barackobama.com/closingthegap

Hillary Clinton aggressively seeks money from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs. She's even said that these lobbyists represent real Americans.

She's wrong.

I think it's time to turn the page on that kind of politics, and that's why I have not accepted a dime from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs in this race. We rely on a network of more than 350,000 ordinary people to make us competitive -- more supporters than all the other Democratic candidates combined.

Washington lobbyists have chosen their candidate and are determined to provide her with an overwhelming advantage. But you can even up this contest.

In the face of the most entrenched political machine in Democratic politics, I believe a movement of ordinary Americans can change our country. And you can prove that right now.

I need you to make a donation to close the gap:

https://donate.barackobama.com/closingthegap

Barack

The email came from info@barackobama.com, interestingly mailed by bounce.bluestatedigital.com.

I was targeted because I was a prior donor and I was given a donation goal based on my previous donations. (Some people were asked for $25, others for $50, some for $100.)

If you click the link to donate, you are then taken to the donation page, where a video appeal from Obama plays automatically. If you then donate, you're asked to email a list of friends or to easily and automatically import all of the contacts in your email account.

You can then choose which contacts (or all of them) to message, and all of these messages are delivered in your name but from info@barackobama.com. I don't know how this particular email ended up in your inbox, but KW from Leawood is most likely someone using this feature or someone else forwarding a message that she sent them. (I don't know about you, but my contacts list contains several journalists, a half dozen newspapers, blogs, names from assorted email lists that I'm on, lots of other strangers.) It would be easy to get carried away with the feature and spread it all over the place.

The Obama campaign has been using this feature from Blue State Digital since forever.

Peter's right about the basic "send-to-a-friend" functionality, but in this case I think the campaign just picked one supporter and sent out an email in her name. I say this because two of my friends received the same email from our "friend" in Leawood, who none of us know.

I think the Obama campaign is encouraging the active members of his email list (in terms of donations/actions) to email those that aren't active (like me, who signed up out of curiosity).

http://www.bivingsreport.com

The Obama campaign seems to have taken in a significant amount and I've heard from others in the know that other campaigns have raised a great deal with this approach.

A separate question, though, is whether or not this technique is succeeding in bringing more people into the political game in a meaningful and sustainable way. That's not something that campaigns can be expected to worry about, of course -- not while the money's rolling in. But it is one possible outcome for using new technologies in creative ways.

During the Howard Dean campaign, supporters sat down in bars and houses to write paper-and-pen letters to voters in Iowa and maybe New Hampshire telling them why Howard was so great. The key was that they were personal, real, and direct. Did those letters earn one extra vote or raise one more dollar? Not sure.

But that sort of exciting engagement in politics circa 2004 is what inspired the whole idea that giving more people more ways to get involved was good for American democracy. It was the grandfather of this email technique, which raises the question of what we see this "bulk personal" email technique evolving to in 2012 and beyond.

I don't think they would raise less money if the return address was the person sending the email. Which would also encourage the person sending the email to take more responsibility for it--an email triangle disperses responsibility unfortunately.

In the long run, if mass email must be used this way, people writing their own emails will be far more sustainable than people using a template, so taking the opportunity to show people models of other real emails, written by other supporters, sics and all (very easy to do) instead of a form email, will create more sustainable support.

It seems clear from the available evidence that this wasn't generated by a real donor importing a contact list or the like, but rather is the Obama camp picking up on what spammers have known for years: faking a personal message from a "real person" is effective, probably much more effective than something from a celeb.

All email communication that purports to be from well-placed sources within the campaign (or the candidate his or herself) tend to be semi-disingenuous. They aren't really telling you what they think, and they're not interested in any response other than a donation. This takes the dishonesty to another level though, because they're essentially falsifying p2p activism.

The unfortunate thing is that this works, which, again, if you check your spam filter, you can see hawkers of viagra and pr0n have been onto for a while. Kudos to Blue State for figuring this out, but 10 demerits for further lowering the moral stock of the Obama campaign.

I should add that what's most annoying and frustrating about this is that doing this "honestly" is not all that hard: just set up a tool that gives your donors templates to use and has them message their own contacts, or send real personalized messages to other registered democrats or not-yet-donated list members.

Of course, once you let people participate you can't really control the message, which I suspect is why this was done fraudulently.