In-Kind Donation Calculator

Use of Connect constitutes an in-kind contribution to your candidate or party committee from Trade Winds Studios Ltd, a Limited Liability Company.. This page tells you how to calculate the amount of the monthly in-kind contribution so that you can report it properly. It is very important that the campaign finance compliance person for your candidate/party committee read this page in full.

Charging for software is basically allocating the costs of developing the software fairly across all committees. We have set the value of Connect based upon the number of voters in a district, modeling projected usage, and created a scale so that the smallest sized districts pay a smaller monthly usage fee, and the largest sized districts pay a larger monthly fee.  

Step 1, determine the number of registered voters in the area for your party/candidate. Democratic registered voters count as 1, Independents count as ½ and voters registered to any other party count as ¼. For example, if your county has 10,000 Democratic voters, 12,000 Independent voters, and 8,000 Republican, etc. voters, that is 10,000 + 6,000 + 2,000 = 18,000 voters in your county.

Step 2, go to the row in the below table that has the smallest number of voters that is greater than the voter count for your county/district. That is the amount of the monthly in-kind contribution you must report from Trade Winds Studios Ltd. to cover the costs of Connect. You do not pay this amount to Trade Winds Studios, instead, you report this amount as a monthly (or you could report it as an annual yearly) in-kind contribution from Trade Winds Studios Ltd. If you use the app for just part of the year, (potentially because a full year exceeds the amount of in-kind contributions you can receive from an LLC), you must report the in-kind contribution only for those months you use the app. Note: we will never ask you for any payment.

This valuation is subject to change without notice. This will only be done if the advice of the campaign donation lawyers we work with determine it is best if we change the valuation calculation. If it is changed, it will remain an in-kind donation, subject to applicable contribution limits to your committee.

This software is owned by Trade Winds Studios, Ltd. and as such we retain the right to disallow any specific organization from using it (i.e. we can exclude David Duke if he ever runs as a Democrat) as well as to allow an organization that is not a Democratic party or candidate to use it (i.e. we can allow Bernie Sanders to use it). Please read the terms of use and privacy policy for all other rights we retain.