The Trump Tax Calculator
A rapid-response app in the final months before the 2020 election.
On September 27, the New York Times published a story that was long suppressed by Donald Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns — he paid $750 in both 2016 and 2017 in taxes. By 11:30PM on September 27, in collaboration with my compatriot Mary Ann Badavi, we had launched the Trump Tax Calculator.
The idea was simple. While it was self-evidently outrageous that a self-professed millionaire wasn’t paying his fair share of taxes, how do you make that hit home? Is there a way to make the story even more personal for everyone who saw it?
Of course there was.
We coded a compact, one-page web app in JavaScript that allows users to input their tax burden and income level and compare it to what Donald Trump paid. We stuck some ActBlue donate links on the bottom to make sure we could funnel people’s outrage into a good cause, and started shooting off the link to everyone on Twitter we could find. The Biden Campaign put up their own version of the calculator the very next day (as I mentioned, the concept was simple and effective), so we took it as a sign we had been on the right track.
While our version of the calculator never truly took off, we raised over $3,500 to help flip the Senate via the ActBlue pages listed on the results page. I dove into the analytics a bit and realized we weren’t getting many conversions on the calculator itself — so where were all of these contributions coming from?
Turns out, even when you’re making ActBlue landing pages for your rapid response app, SEO can really help you close the deal.
