Twitter adds donation buttons for political campaigns
Twitter has teamed up with Square to build a seamless donation function for political campaigns to use on Twitter's mobile app (this is not integrated on desktop yet). To sign up, campaigns will first have to create a Square cash business account and email Square. This will give the campaign a unique web handle, known as a "cashtag". This means that when someone shares a cashtag on Twitter, a "contribute" button will appear in users feeds, users can donate using a debit card. One-click donations will be available after the user has initially put in their information. Adding a donation button to Twitter allows campaigns to reach more people than they normally would with an email list.

Twitter has been working hard this election season to prove its worth to presidential campaigns. Now, with a lot of help from interim CEO Jack Dorsey's other company Square, it's about to be worth a lot more.

This morning, Twitter announced it's teaming up with Square to allow Twitter users to make a donation directly through Twitter. The goal is to remove some of the friction would-be donors face, by putting a big blue "Contribute" button right in their Twitter feed.

To sign up, campaigns must first create a Square Cash business account and email Square. This creates a so-called $Cashtag (essentially a username for Square Cash) that campaigns can Tweet out, automatically generating a Contribute button in user feeds. Twitter users who click the button will be able to input their donation amount, as well as personal information required by the FEC, like their names and addresses.

For campaigns, constantly looking for more lightweight ways to attract new donors, this new tool could be powerful. Sure, users could always click a link and be redirected to the campaign's donation page on their website, but containing the action within the app removes one additional barrier for people, particularly people who are accessing Twitter on mobile.

Figuring out a way to make mobile donations more seamless has been a challenge for campaigns, ever since the FEC approved mobile donations via text back in 2012. That's because the wireless carriers that enable these transactions often charge campaigns a percentage of the donation. By soliciting donations through Twitter, campaigns can circumvent the fees carriers charge, while still reaching donors where they're increasingly spending their time: on their phones.

As Jenna Golden, Twitter's head of political advertising sales wrote in a blog post announcing the news, this is an effective way "for campaigns to execute tailored digital fundraising, in real time, on the platform where Americans are already talking about the 2016 election and the issues they are passionate about."

This move is not just significant for campaigns, but also of course for Square and Twitter, which Dorsey has been running side by side since taking over as interim-CEO of Twitter earlier this year. Despite recent calls for him to be chosen as the permanent CEO of Twitter, in June Twitter's board made it fairly clear that they would allow that to happen if, and only if, he stepped down at Square.