Congressional candidates must report details of their campaign fundraising with the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) after the fact. Under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA) of 2007 (Bill), candidates, leadership PACs and political party committees must disclose contributions bundled by registered lobbyists or by PACs they control. As of July 2008, however, the FEC had not yet promulgated rules for this new requirement.

While HLOGA will provide valuable new information on the lobbyist fundraising scene, it will have some limitations. First, committees must report contributions bundled only by registered lobbyists. That excludes information on the big bundlers—corporate CEOs, wealthy socialites and so forth—who aren’t registered lobbyists, but nonetheless have networks of donors who can contribute tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to a candidate. Second, HLOGA reports will always be retrospective. We will find out about the parties after they are already over.

To get a look at what the party scene is like right now for congressional candidates, the Sunlight Foundation cultivated sources who receive invitations to send them along to us. As a result, the information contained in this database is by no means complete. But we have the advantage of receiving these invitations in “real time,” before the parties occur, in addition to building a base of information about parties that occurred in the past. We also expect that over time, more sources will give us more invitations, creating an ever-richer trove of information.

Once received, invitations are converted into PDF format and loaded into our database. We then enter key information from invitations into our database, so that they will be searchable in a variety of ways. For example, viewers can search by the beneficiary of the party, the date of the party, the venue where the party will take place and so on. We do our best to ensure the quality of the data; however, if you do spot an error, we would appreciate you notifying us.