PublicSquare, a conservative online marketplace and parallel economy leader, is launching a fundraising platform that would challenge WinRed’s monopoly and bring technological innovation to Republican political campaigns, committees, and values-aligned non-profits, Breitbart News has exclusively learned.
The publicly traded financial technology company is set to announce PSQ Impact on Thursday, utilizing its “battle-tested infrastructure” with the guidance of an all-star board of directors — including Donald Trump Jr. — to compete with WinRed, which has positioned itself as Republicans’ answer to the Democrats’ ActBlue behemoth. Impact is looking to snag a major market share by prioritizing transparency while charging lower fees through direct donations and to cement itself as a contender in the space by not being reliant on Big Tech that has historically been unfriendly to conservatives.
“We are a tech company that is entering the conservative political arena because we share the values and the principles of our party and of our movement. We are not politicos that decided to start a tech company, and I think that’s a really important differentiator because our enterprise-grade technology that we have scaled in the for-profit world has a level of security stability, infrastructure scalability that this space has never seen before to this degree,” PublicSquare CEO Michael Seifert told Breitbart News in a phone interview on Wednesday.
PublicSquare, which will function as the parent company of PSQ Impact, launched in 2021 as a solution to conservatives’ exhaustion with woke mob cancelations and companies shoving left-wing ideology down the throats of consumers. Just a few years later, the company has more than 75,000 business vendors on its digital marketplace and more than 1.6 million consumer members, according to its most recent 2023 report.
“We have a long experience of being a financial institution that has empowered a network of millions of patriotic Americans out there with economic liberty,” he continued. “We think that bringing that same legitimacy in our technology stack, paired with a total alignment in values and principles with the conservative movement, makes us a perfect candidate to be able to take this industry by storm and provide an exponential increase in value to the donors, campaigns, committees, and agencies that we’re honored to serve.”
WinRed is endorsed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and is the most dominant fundraising platform on the right. It executes through a PAC and functions as a conduit for contributions from donors to recipient federal candidates and committees. The PAC processes the donations and then handles donation data and distributes it to the relevant campaigns, according to WinRed.
On its FAQs page, it says it was “modeled after years of studying ActBlue, but it combines better technology and a partnership with Data Trust that will massively improve the party’s voter model scores, benefitting all candidates up and down the ballot.” While ActBlue has massively out-raised WinRed in recent elections, WinRed has touted exponential growth since its creation in 2019.
PublicSquare leadership emphasized to Breitbart News that the launch of Impact should not be misconstrued as GOP infighting and an all-out battle against WinRed, but should instead be viewed as an outpouring of the belief that competition produces better results.
“Monopolies can breed complacency, and at the end of the day, monopolies, more than anything else, can tend to stifle innovation,” Seifert said. “And so I think the beauty of us entering this space as a real competitor is that we have a pure focus on providing continually the best product possible, the best customer service because we’re competing for market share,” he said.
“I think it’s really important that, at the end of the day, while our goal is absolutely to earn market share and ultimately earn the majority of market share over time, we’re coming in with a humble posture recognizing that we are only as good or only as worthy of operating and taking on market share as our product is excellent and our customer service is dialed,” he continued. “I think that level of competitive pressure is going to help the Republican Party and the conservative movement more broadly experience a level of excellence that we’ve never yet tapped into.”
Having more than one major fundraising platform also gives conservatives and Republicans more security, Seifert contended, pointing to payment processors, like Stripe (which is used by WinRed), having the power to de-platform users. Impact would avoid those kinds of pitfalls by having its own payment processing infrastructure, Seifert said.
He also pointed to WinRed crashing after President Donald Trump’s arraignment in 2024, potentially missing out on major money.
“Folks were trying to spin up a backup solution for them,” Seifert reflected. “To have the ability as either a campaign, a committee, or an agency to leverage multiple options is a slam dunk for our party and for our movement.”
“All of that together creates an environment in my opinion that is as true to our ethos as conservatives as it ever could be: we are free market capitalists,” he said. “We believe in competition, and ultimately, at the end of the day, we believe in a posture of humility that says, ‘May the best product win.”‘
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As far as what will set Impact apart from its competitor, Seifert touted lower processing fees, streamlined processes, and the use of cutting edge technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve campaign strategies and engagement.
For pricing, Impact, which is targeted to mostly small and medium dollar donors, will charge a 3.5 percent flat rate for donations and 3.2 percent for donations over $500. In comparison, WinRed charges a 3.94 percent fee for donations under $500 and 3.2 percent for larger donations, according to the PAC’s pricing page. Impact will also forego the option for donors to add an additional tip to the organization, like WinRed began to do in 2023.
“Our goal is to see dramatic cost savings so that the power of the donor dollar is exponentially increased. Our goal is to save the Republican Party and their respected donors, and all the campaigns affiliated with the party, tens of millions of dollars every cycle. And we can do that just by our drastically reduced fees,” Seifert said, also adding that tipping features can rack up millions of dollars that do not actually go to campaigns.
Impact is also different fromWinRed because it is not a PAC and it does not file its own FEC reports, instead leaving that to the campaigns and organizations. Instead, it works through a solution that “This space has never seen before” called “allied fundraising,” which allows every respective donor to have a direct relationship with the actual campaign or cause they are contributing to, rather than dealing with a middleman fundraising processors, Seifert explained. He said the model helps to increase transparency and reduce refunds and disputes because of user confusion when they see “WinRed” in their bank statements, rather than the campaign committee or organization they contributed to.
Seifert also previewed how Impact will have AI-powered reporting, in which campaigns and organizations can access fundraising reports and receive an extremely detailed AI-generated analysis that details donor activity and even what kinds of colors and messaging convert to better page performance.
“Leveraging the new wave of technology to help enhance the fundraising effort is going to be paramount,” he said, adding that Impact will also accept cryptocurrency.
“We are the only platform that has really embraced that wave of innovation, and it’s really exciting because I think that with the dramatic growth of the stable coin industry, with the dramatic growth of Bitcoin, we’re going to be able to actually bring that world and conservative politics together in a way that no one else has cracked the code on,” he said.
“We think that all of those pieces together create a really unique opportunity for us to come into this space ultimately make the power of the donor dollar go further and dramatically improve the efficacy of our candidates, committees, and agencies that represent our party,” he said.
Seifert said Impact will include customer service with a chat function based in America, not overseas, that can offer a personalized touch for donors who have questions or concerns.
“We don’t have any H-1Bs. We don’t have any foreign contractors. They are here, and they’re all values-aligned as well,” Seifert said. “They’re all conservatives. They’re all in the movement, so when you have one of our team members that’s willing to engage with you and help you through your donation process, it does a tremendous amount in terms of upping the confidence level of the donor to know, with real assurance, that [their] money is going to go to the cause [they are] championing.”
Seifert said the whole project has been bolstered by input from dynamic board members with relevant experience int the worlds of politics and technology. Some notable board members besides Donald Trump Jr. include Nick Ayers, a leading public policy and business strategist who served in the White House as Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the Vice President from 2017 to 2019; Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of Custodia and dubbed the “queen of crypto” by Seifert; and Blake Masters, an entrepreneur and investor, as well as a 2022 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate.
“These folks guiding this process for us and ushering us into this industry is absolutely invaluable,” Seifert said.
Breitbart News reached out to WinRed for comment but did not receive a response by time of publication.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.