ActBlue and NGP VAN: The Double-Edged Sword of Ubiquity
Mass adoption can create single points of failure
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Hi folks, I’m still cranking on the Democratic field organizing article I mentioned a couple of weeks ago and hope to have that one for you shortly. Newer readers may not know that besides Epolitics, I’ve also been writing a column for Campaigns & Elections for about 15 years now, though I’ve been on a pause for the past few months. As of yesterday, we are back in action on C&E! See below for more.
Also, the video from last week’s digital advertising training for campaigns is now on YouTube, along with the five previous installments in my spring training series. Enjoy them all, and please share with friends and colleagues who might could benefit.
ActBlue and NGP VAN: The Double-Edged Sword of Ubiquity
My latest C&E piece looks at two tech platforms that have long been sources of strength for Democrats. Now, though, they may be turning into vulnerabilities. Most left-leaning donors will already be familiar with ActBlue, since the fundraising platform has become ubiquitous up and down the ballot. Fewer may have heard of NGP VAN, but political staff and many volunteers will have, since the “VAN” part of the company is the primary tool campaigns use to access voter data for field targeting and other purposes.
Naturally, when many campaigns use the same tools, the entire movement can benefit. As I put it in C&E,
ActBlue’s near-universal use among Democrats is important in itself, and it provides a classic example of a technology having a “network effect.” When most Democratic campaigns and many political organizations employ a single tool, the benefits can add up to more than the sum of their individual parts.
Individual Democratic donors have come to know and trust ActBlue, helping them feel confident when a new campaign asks them to donate via the platform.
Features developed for one client naturally become available to other users. In ActBlue’s case, that allows the simultaneous rollout of technologies to thousands of campaigns and organizations across the country. Likewise, staff who learn how to optimize ActBlue for one campaign can take that knowledge to their next jobs.
ActBlue has encouraged repeat donors to enable “one-click donations” on their accounts, so that they can send money to any ActBlue campaign with a single push of a button. The system stores donors’ personal information and uses it to pre-populate donation forms with names, addresses and credit card numbers, making it easier for people to give to a new campaign at the moment, particularly on a cell phone.
NGP VAN’s near-monopoly on voter-data access for Democratic campaigns confers some of the same benefits, since all clients will benefit from new VAN features and field staff’s expertise is similarly portable to new races.
However, ubiquity can bring its own weaknesses, as Democrats are finding out now. Monopolies (actual or functional) create single points of failure. VAN’s problems seem to be internal, since the platform’s technology infrastructure was so overwhelmed last summer that it may have been on the verge of crashing. As you can imagine, a having your primary voter-contact tool go down on Election Day would be a bit of a hindrance (ask Mitt Romney’s team about Project Orca).
Despite NGP’s long relationship with the Democratic party, the DNC has already followed the Movement Cooperative’s lead and sent out an RFP for new grassroots tech. NGP VAN may well keep its relationships with state parties and independent organizations, but market competition encourages innovation, and customers should have more options to choose from by next year.
ActBlue has also suffered internally, in its case from staff turmoil at the least. But its immediate danger comes from the Republican party, both in Congress and in the White House. Congressional committees were already pressing the fundraising platform for internal documents related to supposed donation fraud. Last week, President Trump signed an executive order that brings the Justice Department into the fray, telling AG Pam Bondi to investigate ActBlue for allegedly allowing illegal donations from foreign nationals.
Considering ActBlue’s importance to Democrats, plus the fact that no OTHER donation platforms were mentioned in the EO, these strike me as a political attack rather than a serious attempt to find fraud in the fundraising industry. I suspect the courts will be asked to weigh in on that question at some point, but we shall see.
In any case, Democrats must now confront the trade-offs involved in tech ubiquity. Yes, having a single platform to rule them all brings benefits to the entire movement. But when widespread adoption leads to widespread vulnerability, the entire movement can suffer when something goes wrong. I suspect that we’ll end up with a mixed outcome, in which a couple of tools still dominate their fields but with rivals nipping at their heels. Will more competition help create better Democratic tech in the future? Read the C&E piece for more.
– cpd
Image by Marc Pascual from Pixabay
Mass adoption is a problem, at some level, but if the platform adopted is guaranteed to be movement owned, the risk of mass adoption risk comes from tech failure, government interference, hacking, or business collapse.
But ensuring that the movement owns the tech eliminates the threat of new, non-movement owners destroying the platform (for profit grabbing and to take power away from the users, as we saw with Twitter, Salsa and now NGP-VAN/EveryAction).
Like eggs in one basket...