Hillary Clinton's online operation is adapting the traditional tactics of polling and direct mail to survey subscribers of the campaign's email list.  Political campaigns have always contacted donors and potential supporters via phone polls or direct mail appeals, but Clinton's campaign is going one step further, applying similar techniques to obtain a potentially more honest portrait of its email list. 

I wrote about this survey on Huffington Post's Off the Bus, but come take a look at some of my findings after the jump.

In early December, chief Clinton strategist Mark Penn's private polling firm, Penn Schoen and Berland Associates (PSB), administered a nearly 100-question survey to subscribers of the Clinton campaign's email list. The list members received an email from PSBSurveys.com, a website owned by PSB that pays people for participating in web surveys. The email, sent with the subject line "Election 2008: Who Would You Vote For?", asked recipients to participate in a "fun and interesting" research study about their opinions on the 2008 election. The only explanation as to why people received the survey is a sentence toward the bottom of the email: "You received this email because you subscribed to receive emails about politics."

Penn, Schoen, and Berland Associates is the Clinton campaign's pollster.  PSB took what is currently understood by Internet strategists as an unusual approach for a political campaign's online survey, emailing a web poll to subscribers of the campaign's email list without telling recipients that the message or survey questions were from the candidate.

PSB is allowed to send email to Clinton's email list because each person opted-in to the privacy policy on HillaryClinton.com, which states: "On occasion, we may also use the information that you provide online to contact you for other purposes or to solicit you for contributions." This sentence is a near-catch-all for any type of communication from the campaign, and there was nothing unseemly about the way Hillary Clinton's campaign and PSB conducted this survey given this policy.

The first part of Clinton's web survey asks broad questions about the 2008 election, but about halfway through the survey, begins to ask specific questions about Hillary Clinton, including asking what it would take for the person to`donate to Clinton's campaign. Throughout the survey, respondents are reminded that answers "remain strictly confidential and [are] used for research purposes only. We will never give or sell your personal information to any third parties."

The approach taken by PSB stands out among political campaigns' surveys of its email lists.  The Clinton campaign's purposefully unbranded survey is not an innovation in itself, but it does mark a significant new extension of old politics into the new.