Undo send According to Democratic fundraisers who spoke to The Daily Beast for this article, the “abrupt” end to Google’s Verified Sender Program (VSP) dealt an unintended but significant setback to small-dollar progressive groups who had taken the company up on its offer. Kenneth Pennington, founder of Middle Seat—a leading Democratic digital fundraising firm—alleged to The Daily Beast that some of his progressive clients were “irreparably damaged” by the way Google handled the experiment. “Before the VSP program, there was a status quo in place about how senders were getting into inboxes which was fine, and it worked well for campaigns using typical best practices for email marketers,” Pennington said. “This program then incentivized people to make changes that hurt their sender reputation, and then with five days’ notice, Google announced they were shutting it down in a way that irreparably damaged the small-dollar campaigns that enrolled.” Last week, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) weighed in, calling the fallout a “giant assist from Google to the billionaire donor class.” The big flip-flop The irony is thick. First, the same Republicans that Google was trying to placate largely spurned the voluntary program. The GOP’s decision appears in part related to an anti-discrimination lawsuit the Republican National Committee filed against Google last October. After all, if the RNC had taken advantage of the offer and seen a benefit, Republicans would have been hard pressed to convince a court that Google was intentionally targeting conservatives. Google later revealed in a January court filing that the RNC never joined the program. An RNC spokesperson didn’t reply to The Daily Beast’s request for comment. In a rare 6-0 bipartisan decision this January, the FEC tossed an RNC complaint that said Google had intentionally deployed its technology with a political bias against Republicans, constituting “illegal in-kind contributions” to Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates. The complaint cited a North Carolina State University study, but the authors later said their work was being misrepresented and “has nothing in it that demonstrates that someone is deliberately trying to turn the elections.” Second—after the Democratic National Committee predicted that, as a result of Google’s proposed program, “Donors will be harmed, and confidence in our democracy and its leaders will be undermined”—Democrats jumped all over the opportunity, and saw a dramatic boost in email engagement. But that created an unforeseen problem, according to fundraisers. The rapid growth set them up for a major contraction. When Google announced it had decided to kill the VSP in late January, it was now mostly Democrats who found themselves unexpectedly in the spam bin. Hair of the dog Karin Roland, director of product at progressive digital fundraising house ActionKit, said her firm’s clients saw their email engagement on average double under the program. But when Google announced last call, clients got hit with a “post-VSP hangover.” “After the program ended, campaigns saw increased spam reports, what we’ve called a ‘post-VSP hangover,’” Roland said. The hangover has begun to ease for some campaigns who have made proactive adjustments, she said, adding that it was “still way too soon to see the long-term effect.” Bad reputation According to Pennington, the VSP had a vicious recoil. “With emails, your reputation is built over time, as an address incrementally sends out a larger and larger list to people who open those emails and show that they want to receive them,” Pennington explained. “When you end the program and those emails go back to the promotions inbox, then those same people suddenly aren’t opening emails,” he said. When open rates drop suddenly, Google begins to see those emails as spam. “The abrupt nature of it ending overnight with no phase-out caused the pollution of the data set of who’s an active user and who’s not,” he said. “I believe this was unintentional, but when you’re a monopoly then sometimes even unintentional things can have dangerous consequences.” Best practices Reached for comment, Google spokesperson José Castañeda told The Daily Beast that the company was always clear about the end date. “As we made clear from the beginning, the Verified Sender Program pilot would operate for a limited period ending on January 31st,” Castañeda said. He added that Google “encouraged program participants to follow bulk sender best practices” and “cautioned all bulk senders that spammy activity during the pilot would impact participants following the conclusion of the pilot.” Today, Google claims the program had “bipartisan” participation from more than 100 campaigns. But the company refused multiple times to describe that partisan breakdown. The company announced its final decision to end the program in a court filing on Jan. 24. “If I were Google, I wouldn’t have done the program in the first place,” Pennington added. “If I’m a big corporation holding onto a monopoly, then I’m not getting involved in the political conversation.”
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