A political donation begins, quite often, with a feeling. Somebody says something appalling. A familiar candidate sends an urgent email. Twenty dollars seems a reasonable price for feeling useful again. But the transaction answers only the easiest question: whom do you dislike? Oath, a political giving company, wants to interrupt the journey before checkout and ask where that money could do some work.
- Find Democratic candidates by issue, geography or funding need.
- Compare races using competitiveness, stakes and financial need.
- Give once or monthly, with no platform fee and optional tips.
- Keep your email and phone from recipients; public reporting still applies.
This is an awkward proposition for an industry accustomed to treating attention as an asset. A donor may know a Senate challenger’s name and nothing about a nearby legislative contest. Recognition makes the first gift easy. It says remarkably little about whether another gift is needed. Oath’s business sits inside that gap between knowing a name and knowing what to do.
The friends who wanted a better answer
Brian Derrick and Taylor Ourada met during their first week at Ohio State. They shared an interest in philanthropy and helped other students get involved in charitable giving. Politics presented a harder allocation problem. After the anxiety of the 2020 election, they wanted donors to have a clearer sense of whether their contributions mattered. Higher Ground Labs dates Oath’s founding to 2021; the giving platform soft-launched in 2022.
Derrick brought experience as a Democratic fundraiser. He understood the imbalance between a wealthy donor with professional advice and a small donor confronted by a persuasive appeal. The initial product attracted roughly 10,000 donors and directed more than $2 million, according to contemporary reporting. That gave the founders something more substantial than an agreeable theory: people willing to use it. Higher Ground Labs backed Oath and included it in its 2023 accelerator.
A score for the next dollar
The centerpiece is an Impact Score, a proprietary rating from zero to ten. It asks three related questions. Is the race competitive? Would its result matter beyond the individual seat? Does the campaign still need money? Oath combines polling, expert assessments and historical trends with fundraising and spending data. The score is meant to describe the relative value of an additional contribution.
Financial need is the particularly interesting part. The model considers media-market costs, previous fundraising, an opponent’s resources and outside spending. A campaign that badly needs its first useful advertising buy is a different proposition from one already swimming in cash. Oath also considers “nested” races, where mobilizing a voter may help several close contests on the same ballot. A local campaign can have consequences upstairs.
For the user, this becomes a fairly ordinary shopping experience. Search for candidates, issues or states. Add recipients to a cart. Set donation amounts at the next step. The company also offers personalized recommendations and monthly giving. When a recurring recipient becomes fully funded, or a race changes materially, Oath says it asks the donor to confirm a new group with greater need. Reconsideration becomes part of the product.
The candidate cannot buy the recommendation
“We think it’s important that we’re not taking funding from candidates”
Brian Derrick / Campaigns & Elections, 2023
The financing follows the advice. Oath charges no platform fee and relies on voluntary tips. Its help center says more than 80% of donors leave one. Candidates cannot purchase inclusion or a better rating. Those choices matter because a donor adviser has a credibility problem whenever the recommended recipient also pays the adviser. Oath has chosen a model in which donors support the service.
Payment still costs money. Current published processing charges are 3.7% plus one cent for credit cards and 1% plus one cent for ACH, borne by the recipient. On an illustrative $100 contribution, those charges are $3.71 and $1.01 respectively, before any separate voluntary tip. Democracy Engine handles processing. Oath is a company, rather than a PAC or charity, and donations move directly from donors to selected recipients through that processor.
Recipient bears the charge. Optional tips are separate.
The quiet pleasure of an unshared phone number
Oath’s other attraction is mundane enough to be persuasive: a political gift need not become a subscription to political pestering. The company says it neither sells nor shares donor email addresses and phone numbers with recipients. Campaigns joining the platform are instructed not to contact its donors. Public hiring language extends the same idea to Oath’s own communications, rejecting fake deadlines and manufactured urgency.
There are limits to that promise. Campaign-finance reporting can require personal information, including an address, employer or occupation. Contact privacy does not confer anonymity. A campaign may also have acquired a donor’s details elsewhere. Oath’s promise addresses the information passed through its own donation process; it cannot erase every copy already circulating. That distinction makes the feature easier to understand and harder to mistake for magic.
Count the close races, too
Oath reports over 67% of funding went to races decided by less than five points.
Higher Ground Labs reports that Oath directed more than $37 million through 300,000 donations in 2024. Oath’s own account emphasizes the share sent to races ultimately decided by less than five points. A platform could advertise an excellent win rate by directing money to comfortable favorites. Closeness measures a different choice: whether donors supported contests where additional resources plausibly had a use.
It does not establish that the donations caused victories. Election outcomes have many parents, and the algorithm contains judgments about budgets and importance. Donors seeking Republican recommendations, guaranteed results or unrestricted candidate coverage will need a different approach. Oath serves Democratic and progressive giving; a missing candidate may simply not have been onboarded. Its advice is most useful when the donor’s goal is allocation rather than personal loyalty.
The transferable lesson is pleasantly unfashionable. Decide what success means before opening the appeal. Compare the alternatives. Ask whether the next dollar has somewhere useful to go. Then revisit the decision when circumstances change. ActBlue and campaign websites make contributing convenient; Oath adds an advising layer to that transaction. The appeal of the company is the pause it inserts into a market built to hurry people along.