Q) Will you add my chipin?

Sure will.. just check out this page and email me the info requested on it.

Q) Will you add my link?

Probably... maybe not.. most likely.

Q) Where does the data come from?

The data comes from the official campaign and is ultimately a happy side effect of the way they designed the campaign fundraising widget. I collect the data every 2 minutes.

The webservice that I use to get these numbers (the same one that feeds the Raising to Win widget) was effectively down from 3am 10/3 until 8am 10/4. I was able to add a couple data points durring this time based on information that was posted in the previous widget. The number of donors was unavailable in any form durring that down time, so I populated that stat with numbers that would create a constant slope over the missing data period. Other than that time period, all data is taken directly from the official numbers provided by the campaign.

Q) Why don't the numbers in graph X match the numbers on the ronpaul2008.com site?

All graphs, unless otherwise noted, include online totals only. The campaign periodically adds in offline donations to the total on the widget... but without knowing when these donations were actually made, it doesn't seem helpful to add them in a number of places. Graphs that have offline totals generally add them to the first data point so it may occasionally that the quarter starts at a number greater than zero.

Many of the non graphed figures that cover the entire quarter include the offline figures.. including projectons and averages.

It might seem a little strange at first, but you'll get a feel for it :)

Q) How do you calculate the "estimated new donors" number?

A) Every time I get data from the campaign website, there are a handful of name,city,state combos in the data. If the name hasn't appeared in the data before, I count it as "new"... by dividing the number of new donors by the total number of captured names for a given day, I get the percentage of new captured donor names. I then multiply that percentage by the actual number of donors (provided by the campaign web service with each update) to get my estimation.

Q) How accurate is the "estimated new donors" number?

A) It depends on the day. The faster donations are coming in, the more missed names there are, the less accurate the number. You can use this graph http://ronpaulgraphs.com/US_pc_donors.html to get an idea how accurate the number is. The larger the gap between the red and black lines for the day, the less accurate the green line (new donors) is. There is no way for me to calibrate this number and its utility may degrade over time... so take it with a grain of salt.