Artists for Biden, a digital fundraiser for the 2020 election
In the summer of 2020, David Zwirner was asked to build the digital infrastructure for a presidential campaign fundraiser: Artists for Biden. Artists and galleries across the country were donating works and we would build the experience, a site that felt like an art event, for a moment when doing something felt like the least we could do. We had about six weeks.
The gallery was chosen because of what we'd built with Online Viewing Rooms during the pandemic. We had credibility and a playbook. What we quickly discovered was that the infrastructure we assumed we could reuse had to be largely restructured for campaign finance reasons, which meant we were building more from scratch than anticipated, on a timeline that hadn't accounted for that.
The Artists for Biden fundraising art sale site launched during the final weeks of the 2020 election.
We knew someone was going to land on this page already with strong intent to buy. The job was to not lose them.
We knew someone was going to land on this page already with strong intent to buy. The job was to not lose them. The experience had to be seamless enough that a collector moving from our front end into the campaign's checkout didn't feel the handoff. The launch was staged across multiple phases for different audiences. There were a lot of voices in the room with strong opinions about what the site should be, and my role increasingly became holding the line on what the experience would feel like for someone who wasn't in that room.
Behind the scenes, a lot of it was unglamorous coordination that existed entirely so the experience on the other side could feel effortless. From the outside it was invisible, which was the only thing that mattered.
The fundraiser worked. Works sold at prices up to $350,000↗ and we raised more than $2.5M↗ for the campaign. More lastingly, it proved that the infrastructure and credibility the gallery had built around online sales could extend beyond its own walls. It led to Platform.art, a multi-gallery sales initiative, and eventually to click-to-buy functionality on the main gallery site. The six weeks of scrambling turned out to have a longer tail than anyone expected.
Prelaunch page to capture interest.
Many artists had full dedicated pages to contextualize the artwork.