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Organizing
campaigns
“Deep Canvassing” and the Lessons Political Campaigns Can Learn From It
November 22, 2019
Deep Canvassing has grown in popularity as an organizing tool in the past few years, but while most people have heard of it, many are still unsure exactly what it is. The fundamentals behind deep canvassing are not new, in fact, organizing has always been based on the simple underlying belief that human conversations have the power to change minds and spur action. The modern form of deep canvassing was developed by the Leadership LAB of the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Their Project Director, Dave Fleisher, describes it saying,
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Organizing
campaigns
7 Things All Organizers Should Do to Treat Themselves on the Campaign Trail
October 23, 2019
Self-care is easy to talk about, but much harder to put into practice when you are living the fast-paced campaign life. Here are seven easy ways that you can integrate it into your routine as an organizer:
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Organizing
Shifting into Distributed Organizing
September 4, 2019
Distributed organizing is growing in popularity, but what does it take to provide your membership with more autonomy and set them up for success?
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Organizing
Seamless Peer-to-Peer Texting Integrations with NGP VAN
August 5, 2019
Announcing New Partnerships with ThruText and Shadow Messaging
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14 Tweets to Help You Thrive this Cycle
July 30, 2019
Campaign staffers are our favorite people.
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Organizing
Staying Cool: Tips for Beating the Summer Heat on the Campaign Trail
July 1, 2019
Direct voter contact is so important to the health of our democracy, but how do you protect your canvassers from record-breaking summer heat?
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EveryAction Acquires BSD Tools
June 24, 2019
Also Announces the EveryAction Innovation Fund, And Free APIs
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EveryAction Acquires DonorTrends
June 6, 2019
Predictive Analytics Fundraising Product Fuels EveryAction’s Rise in Nonprofit Market Washington, D.C., June 6, 2019 – EveryAction, a leading software provider for nonprofit fundraisers, announced today that it has acquired DonorTrends. The acquisition empowers EveryAction’s clients to raise more money and furthers EveryAction’s strategy of bringing innovation in revenue generation to its SaaS products.
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Organizing
Digital
Fundraising
NGP VAN Partners with DMO to Bring Affordable Campaign Technology to Local Races
May 28, 2019
Running for office is hard — but running an efficient and effective operation doesn’t have to be.
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EveryAction Acquires ActionKit
May 8, 2019
Innovative Talent and Digital Product Add to EveryAction’s Rapid Growth Washington, D.C., May 8, 2019 – EveryAction, a leading provider of software serving over 15,000 nonprofits, announced today that it has acquired We Also Walk Dogs Inc., more commonly known by their product’s name, ActionKit. The acquisition follows EveryAction’s strategy of collecting the best people who create the best SaaS products, that provide the most value to nonprofits.
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Design
Product
Introducing Navigational Keyboard Shortcuts
July 17, 2018
Get around faster with Keyboard Shortcuts, an easy way to navigate our most used pages.
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Digital
Fundraising
NGP
Product
New in NGP 8: ActBlue Contribution Integration
March 6, 2018
In the fast-paced environment of a political campaign, it is important that directors and strategists have always have access to up-to-date information and data. Because some campaigns use multiple databases to process and house that information, exporting and uploading records between systems consumes staff time and can leave decision makers waiting or using out-of-date information.
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engineering
The Correct Way to Write Software
February 15, 2018
I've spent over 15 years in the software industry, much of it in management, and there are certain conversations that I have either witnessed or participated in repeatedly over the course of my career. Not surprisingly, many of them are related to the concept of the proper way to build software.
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Organizing
VAN
Organizing Still Matters: What We Saw in Virginia in 2017
November 9, 2017
If there was ever any question, Tuesday’s stunning results in Virginia validated the important roles that both technology and grassroots organizing play in winning elections. Democrats routed their Republican opponents up and down the ballot, propelled by historic levels of voter engagement.
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Organizing
Design
Visualize Your Campaign's Data in a Whole New Way
October 19, 2017
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.
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Design
Research
Product
How We Incorporate User Feedback into Our Products
October 5, 2017
We care about what you think and are constantly working to improve our products. We’ve put together a suite of tools and frameworks to help us better incorporate user feedback into our everyday product decisions so that we can create a better product experience for you.
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Design
Product
ProgressUI
We're Refreshing Our Look
September 28, 2017
We’re excited to announce the first in a series of updates that refresh the look and feel of our products. We’ve been hard at work improving our internal product development processes and building out a new version of ProgressUI, our internal user experience framework. We're rolling out a refresh that focuses on fonts, colors, and other minor changes that we believe will make our products easier to use. Here's what changed:
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Design
Product
ProgressUI
We're Improving Our Process to Improve Our Products
September 21, 2017
A few years ago, we recognized that we could do better when it came to the user experience of our products. We formed a design team, hiring user researchers, product designers, and front-end engineers. We got to work improving processes and building a suite of tools to help us work efficiently and effectively. We established product design principles, design guidelines, and built an all-new design system we call ProgressUI. Working with product leadership, we changed the product development process to incorporate design and user feedback early and often. These changes have helped us push the design and experience of our product forward and we’ve learned a lot.
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hackathon
Dreaming Big at NGP VAN's 5th Annual Company-Wide Hackathon
August 29, 2017
Earlier this month, we concluded our fifth Hackathon, and we're excited to announce the results!
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Planning Your Trip Well
August 22, 2017
Last year, we completed a massive project, Action Platform, which our CTO, John Lee, describes here. Needless to say, we consider this project to be a huge success. One reason for that is alluded to in John's third Lesson from his post: "Plan Your Trip Well". He discusses the importance of milestones, which are really a component of a more important process: Estimation. Estimating large software development projects is hard, but necessary.
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Powerful, Targeted Facebook Ad Integration Now Available to Campaigns
June 15, 2017
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.
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Action Platform
Rebuilding the Rocket Ship In-Flight
June 13, 2017
At NGP VAN, our vision is to enable sophisticated multi-channel campaigns and unify interactions across fundraising, organizing, and communications objectives.
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Digital
Rank Your Supporters & Measure Their Involvement with Engagement Points
May 23, 2017
When it comes to a campaign's supporter engagement and fundraising, not all supporters are created equal. Campaigns often have numerous different types of people who support their candidate: passive social media followers, small-dollar donors, part-time volunteers, super-volunteers, and mega-donors, just to name a few.
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Digital
New Facebook Events Integration Pulls Attendee Data Directly Into Your Database
May 11, 2017
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.
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Leverage Your Supporters' Influence and Follow Engagement with Social Share Tracking
May 11, 2017
Organizations have enormous untapped potential in the form of their supporters’ social networks and influence. To tap into this, you need know who shares your content, but more importantly, you want to know who is succeeding at referring new people – and donations - to your organization
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hackathon
What We Worked on at Debug Politics 2017
May 2, 2017
We're seeing a revolution in progressive technology. Everywhere we look, coders are taking to their keyboards in order to build apps and tools to help the resistance. It's one of the most hopeful signs we've seen since the 2016 elections - and we are excited to pitch in and help! NGP VAN's tools are a great way to turbo-charge the progressive hacking community.
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A Day Without the Women of NGP VAN
March 8, 2017
The women of NGP VAN are magic - they're developers, engineers, designers, accountants, human resource professionals, sales & account managers, marketers, client services representatives, and data specialists, and our company and our tools would not be here if it weren't for their expertise, dedication, and passion for building a better world.
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engineering
2 Things That Could Be Holding Back Your Development as a Software Engineer
October 21, 2016
Many software developers are understandably eager to jump into their first job with both feet. They're raring to write great code to change the world, but then in the first few months they find themselves frustrated. "Why all the red tape? Why so much bureaucracy? Why don't they just let me write code and get out of my way? Why am I only doing small UI tweaks?" If this sounds like you, you may be encountering two of the most common roadblocks in a young engineer's career.
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engineering
How Drupal's Form API is Reinventing Progressive Activism on Wordpress & Beyond
October 13, 2016
Regardless of what gets you excited about progressive politics - whether it's health care reform, or making college affordable, or a clean energy future - the chances are pretty good that you've encountered a signup form, contribution form, or petition. These forms, which political campaigns use to gather supporters and survey their volunteers, are just about ubiquitous today.
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engineering
Getting Out the Vote with OpenID Connect
September 27, 2016
The leaves are turning and pumpkins are going on sale, and that can mean only one thing: Political campaigns are gearing up to go door-to-door, asking for your vote.
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engineering
Re-introducing Our Engineering Blog: Building an OS for the Progressive Movement
September 15, 2016
The progressive movement is a thriving ecosystem of political candidates, labor unions, interest groups, and grassroots activists. Together, these far-flung and energetic people have made history at the presidential level - twice! - in the space of 8 short years. They've brought down discriminatory barriers for LGBT individuals, guaranteed health insurance for every American, instituted major financial protections for consumers - and on and on. But how did they do it? What makes this incredible movement tick?
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Culture
NGP VAN Named One of “50 Best Workplaces” by Inc. Magazine
May 25, 2016
WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Inc. Magazine named NGP VAN as one of its inaugural “50 Best Workplaces”, the first such measurement of American companies with up to 500 employees that deploy state-of-the-art techniques to keep their staff happy and productive.
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Culture
Investing in Our Employees' Future
April 21, 2016
Paying for college can be a huge burden, with tuition costs rising faster every year. Having a dedicated savings plan in place with automatic contributions makes it much easier to manage costs, pursue a degree, or save for a child’s future.
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Data Security and Privacy
December 18, 2015
Update: 12/19, 9:46PM EST Late last night we were directed by our client the DNC to restore the Sanders campaign's full access to VoteBuilder. NGP VAN staff worked through the night to ensure Sanders campaign staff were up and running by early this morning. For clarification, NGP VAN played no part in the October data issue that has been mentioned. We look forward to working closely with the DNC and our partners on the important next steps that will ensure Democratic success around the country in November. Update: 12/18, 3:53 PM EST Updating with additional information and clarification: First, a one page-style report containing summary data on a list was saved out of VoteBuilder by one Sanders user. This is what some people have referred to as the “export” from VoteBuilder. As noted below, users were unable to export lists of people.
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Democratic/Progressive Voter Contacts: 387 Million
November 3, 2014
Up 68% in 2014 over 2010 For Immediate Release: November 3rd, 2014 On the day before the election, NGP VAN provided previously unreleased information that Democrats and progressives had made a total of 386,889,562 voter contacts so far in the 2014 cycle. This is an increase of 68% over the voter contacts made in the 2010 cycle. The increase will grow even larger after the voter contacts for Monday and Tuesday are factored in.
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NGP VAN Launches Innovation Platform, Significant Updates to Tools
August 21, 2014
Next Chapter for Progressive Tech Ecosystem Washington, DC – Tonight, at an event attended by hundreds of top Democratic and progressive campaign insiders and joined by thousands more through an online live stream, leading tech company NGP VAN launched the next major chapter in the evolution of the progressive political technology ecosystem and set a path that will continue to give Democrats and progressives a tech edge.
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NGP VAN Launches Social Fundraising
July 19, 2014
WASHINGTON, DC – Today NGP VAN announced the public launch of Social Fundraising, a new tool that helps Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations empower supporters to raise money on their behalf. Unlike other peer-to-peer online fundraising platforms, Social Fundraising integrates both online and offline fundraising; a key feature for fundraisers who are frequently frustrated by the lack of offline integration in many online-only tools.
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NGP VAN and Catalist Partner on Innovative "Activist Continuum" Project for the National Education Association
June 6, 2014
WASHINGTON, DC – The National Education Association (NEA) announced today that it is working with Catalist and NGP VAN to develop its “Activist Continuum.” This project uses Catalist “Big Data” analytics to synthesize and understand NEA member activity across a range of civic activities, and make that understanding of each member actionable in the NGP VAN software via features developed for the NEA. This will allow the NEA to interact with members at the correct level of engagement, on the issues they care about, leading to more action and greater efficiency.
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Network Effects Give Democrats Online Fundraising Edge
April 24, 2014
WASHINGTON, DC – Democrats up and down the ticket are seeing increased online contributions during this election cycle, powered in part by network effects that are providing them with improved conversion rates, due to the prevalence of NGP VAN, the leading tools provider to Democratic and progressive campaigns. Thousands of Democratic candidates and committees are clients of NGP VAN, ranging from Ready For Hillary, to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, to over 80% of the Democrats in the U.S. House, to thousands of other Democratic state legislative and smaller campaigns.
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