The Republican National Committee Launches New Technology with The Network Companies

The Network Companies LLC announced the launch of the new RNC Toolbar offered by the Republican National Committee. The Network Companies LLC, in partnership with FreeCause, Inc., designed and developed the revolutionary fundraising and communication toolbar application that the RNC successfully launched last week: www.gop.org/toolbar. “We are thrilled to be offering this powerful tool to the Republican National Committee, and we hope that the fundraising and communication benefits help propel the Committee towards its goals for the future.” John Weaver, Senior Partner at The Network Companies, said. “The RNC has really shown its supporters that Republicans, too, can be leaders in the technological space.”

The application raises money every time a supporter performs a search through the Yahoo! powered toolbar. Also, when supporters purchase items through the toolbar at select internet retailers, a portion of the sale amount is directed back to the organization. The toolbar application provides political and nonprofit organizations the opportunity to monetize supporters every day activities – generating new revenue streams for their cause with a limited investment of time or money.

The toolbar’s communication features include auto-updatable RSS and News feeds, links to pages on the organization’s websites, all the components offered by the Google and Yahoo! toolbars such as the weather and email checker, and the most powerful feature – the messaging component. Through the messaging component, organizations are able to segment messaging based on demographic data – providing a powerful tool for micro-targeting and broadcasting key messages and user-specific calls to action. “We like to call these toolbars ‘bumper stickers for the browser,’ and we strongly believe that the fundraising and communication tools the applications provide will make them a necessity for all political and nonprofit organizations in the future.” Weaver said.

The Network Companies and FreeCause also offer social networking applications and strategic marketing advice. Weaver went on to say, “With social networks like Facebook and MySpace dominating people’s time spent online and growing by tens of thousands of users each day, all organizations need to establish a real presence on these platforms.” The Republican National Committee joins the National Rifle Association and the Republican Party of Michigan as users of the toolbar technology.

The Network Companies LLC, a multi-service firm offering public affairs and crisis management, political consulting, and affinity and direct marketing is based in Washington, DC. The Network has the exclusive rights to all domestic and international political clients of the FreeCause toolbar application. FreeCause, Inc. is a software and technology development firm based in Boston, MA.

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