NGP VAN was created in November 2010 by the merger of its two predecessor companies, NGP Software, founded in 1997 by Nathaniel Pearlman, who later served as chief technology officer for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, in his attic in Washington, D.C, and Voter Activation Network, founded in 2001 by Mark Sullivan, in his study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In October 2014, NGP VAN launched their EveryAction fundraising management platform for non-profits. There are occasional accusations that the Democratic Party has restricted access to Votebuilder to hold off a challenge to an incumbent office holder in a primary. For example, Rachel Ventura, running against an incumbent Democrat in IL-11, was told “I've heard from our Executive Director. Your request for Votebuilderfor Illinois' 11th Congressional District through the Democratic Party of Illinois has been denied due to our regulations that we don’t issue subscriptions to candidates challenging an incumbent.” In 2019, the company made several major acquisitions, including ActionKit, BSD Tools, and DonorTrends.
Products
MiniVAN is a mobilecanvassing application that allows for campaigns and organizations to contact voters or supporters, collect data, and sync the information back to their VAN or EveryAction database in real time, thus eliminating the need for paper lists and data entry. In 2018, the company reported record usage of the app - 71% of progressive voter contact attempts were made on MiniVAN instead of paper lists. VoteBuilder is one of the software systems created by NGP VAN. It is used by the Democratic Party and associated campaigns to track interaction with potential voters. Votebuilder is used as part of campaign voter persuasion and "get out the vote" operations. It stores information like phone calls and other methods of contact with voters in the system. The software was created in 2006 to bridge a perceived gap in microtargeting abilities between the Republican and Democratic parties. On Wednesday December 16, 2015, NGP VAN released a code update to their Votebuilder application which contained a bug that allowed two campaigns to see proprietary analytical scores. On the evening of Thursday, December 17 the DNC revoked the Sanders campaign's access to the national voter file, after the campaign accessed and saved data collected by the Clinton campaign. The Sanders campaign sued the DNC in District Court and concurrently fired Josh Uretsky, the staffer who managed 3 other members of the Sander's campaign who improperly accessed the data. On December 19, the DNC restored the Sanders campaign's access after the campaign agreed to cooperate with their investigation. NGP is a software platform for digital engagement, fundraising, and compliance reporting used by most federal Democratic campaigns. It is also used by state and local campaigns, albeit less often due to the service's high price tag. In August 2017, the company released NGP 8 used for campaign compliance. Innovation Platform is a series of APIs and integrations that was rolled out in 2014. “It will allow outside software developers and other engineers to write programs directly for its platforms.” Several notable integrations include apps and services such as self-serve online advertising, broadcast and peer-to-peer text messaging tools, live calls, and do-it-yourself direct mail.
