The Jeff Beckham Weblog

Barack Obama made news last week by announcing he’s opting out of accepting public funds for his presidential campaign. Instead, he’ll continue to rely on individual donations.

XPLANE, a company that specializes in explaining complex information in a visual format, has come up with a terrific visualization to illustrate that concept, and show how Obama has reshaped how people donate to political causes.

Individuals are limited to donating $2,000, so “bundlers”, those fundraisers who influence their network of friends to make maximum donations, have been critically important in the past. The Obama campaign has made use of the efficiency of the web and social networks to take bundling in a new direction.

Millions of small individual donations allowed Obama to raise $32 million in January, $28 of which was raised online.

Infographic: Released by XPLANE under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.