Understanding your supporters and meeting them where they are is an increasingly important part of any outreach campaign. From a grassroots effort to mobilize broad audiences like the Women’s March to high-touch, high dollar fundraising, having more information about the social media habits of your supporters will help you be more effective in your outreach.

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:

NGP VAN is a progressive, mission-driven company that works every day to help Democrats and progressives change the world - whether they’re running for office or advocating for a cause. Taking our company’s values to heart, we believe the tools we build should reflect the values that matter to us and our clients -  of diversity, inclusion, and social justice, to name a few.

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.

VAN is the technology backbone of nearly every Democratic campaign and progressive organization in the country. Every day from now until November, thousands of organizers and volunteers will use VAN to manage key aspects of their work - but we know that it hasn’t always been easy for people to jump right into the work they need to do. That’s why we built Dashboard.

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.

Traditionally, innovations in the digital political world have been focused primarily around online fundraising. Innovations like one-click donations, mobile responsive forms, welcome series emails, pre-filling form fields, and A/B testing have long been focused on improving conversion rates for contribution forms. That’s been great for digital fundraisers, but what about organizers? Today we’re excited to announce the launch of an entirely new suite of digital tools just for organizers: introducing Field Automation, Targeted Email, and Online Actions on VAN.

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.