Campaigns are fast moving and deal with a ton of data - whether its coming from their field, digital, or fundraising teams. Organizers and staff need a quick way to analyze their data and see if their campaign is on track. 

Political campaigns are increasingly finding new ways to engage supporters on Facebook, and one key way is through the use of targeted advertising through Facebook Ads Manager. Especially for down-ballot candidates, Facebook Ads are a precise, cost-effective way to raise more money, sign up more supporters, and communicate a message to a specific audience.

NOTE: This feature is currently unavailable due to changes made by Facebook in early 2018. Stay tuned for updates! Facebook is one of the most important digital organizing tools of our time. Every day, nonprofits and other organizations use Facebook's events platform to build crowds and recruit attendees to actions, protests, fundraisers, parties, and other types of events. 

Our team is always listening to organizers and volunteers to discover how VAN can help field programs maximize their efforts. That’s why we’re excited to release improvements to Turf Manager which make navigating the page, printing region summaries, and cutting, sending and monitoring Turf with MiniVAN even easier and more efficient. Here's some changes we made that will help organizers navigate more easily through Turf Manager:

Continuing to build upon our commitment to transforming campaign technology through our Innovation Platform, NGP VAN is excited to launch a new partnership with DSPolitical to bring its award-winning, self-serve voter targeted digital advertising platform DemocraticAds.com to the VAN.

Digital innovation has touched almost every sector of the political world. Donating is easier online, organizers can go door to door with their iPhones, and social media outreach has changed the game. But older workhorse tools - like direct mail - have been slow to evolve. That changes this cycle.

NGP VAN’s Innovation Platform is making it easier for campaigns of all sizes to run fully-integrated, sophisticated multi-channel voter contact campaigns. This week, we’re highlighting one of our many progressive technology partners from the Innovation Platform Marketplace - Empower Engine. A web mapping application for Democrats and Progressives, Empower Engine was co-founded in 2013 by NGP VAN alumni Julie Goldberg and Noah Glusenkamp.

More than ever before, campaign volunteers are ditching clipboards and paper lists for canvassing apps like MiniVAN. Mobile canvassing is already completely transforming field programs, helping canvassers get out the vote more easily and efficiently. Now, we’re ready to take field organizing to the next level – by introducing Script Branching on MiniVAN.

One key feature that we provide on NGP is automatic matching to individuals’ Facebook and Twitter profiles based on their email address. This week, we’re excited to announce that we’ve added another key social network to our social matching feature: LinkedIn.

This spring, more than 250 organizations representing a diverse array of movements and thousands of people are coming together in Washington, DC for Democracy Awakening - to mobilize to protect voting rights, get big money out of politics, and demand fair consideration of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. Groups like People for the American Way, MoveOn.org, NAACP, LCV Education Fund, Equality Federation, and many others have joined forces for this massive weekend of events. Mobilizing progressive activists on such a huge scale takes a lot of work and requires sophisticated organizing tools - so when event organizers began planning their outreach, they knew NGP VAN could help.