Type Private Revenue US$ 26.8m(2014) Founded 2001 | Area served Worldwide Number of employees 163 (2014) | |
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Industry Voter databases. IT Consulting, Software as a service, Web hosting service, Online fundraising, new media technology Key people Stuart Trevelyan
(President & CEO) Headquarters Washington, D.C., United States Founders Nathaniel Pearlman, Mark Sullivan Profiles | ||
NGP VAN is a privately owned American company specializing in helping progressive campaigns and organizations leverage technology to meet their goals. In 2009, the company was the largest partisan provider of campaign compliance software, used by most Democratic members of Congress. The company's services are utilized by clients such as the Obama 2012 presidential campaign, the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign, the British Liberal Democrats, and the Liberal Party of Canada.
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Its current president and CEO, Stuart Trevelyan, was a veteran of the 1992 Clinton-Gore War Room, providing research, analysis, and whip counts to the Clinton Administration as a member of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs.
History
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 nonprofit arm, EveryAction.
VoteBuilder
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. The introduction of such software has been called a revolution in campaigning as it allows for very detailed information to be stored, including "every door knock and phone call." The software was created in 2006 to bridge a perceived gap in microtargeting abilities between the Republican and Democratic parties. Along with the central voter database storing the voter information, there is also an app for smartphones and tablets that is intended to be used by canvassers.
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. After the bug was fixed, it was revealed that the national data director of the Bernie Sanders for President, Josh Uretsky, had been accessing scores collected by the Clinton campaign. On late Thursday, December 17 the DNC temporarily revoked the Sanders campaign's access to the national voter file until the campaign confirmed that any copies of the Clinton data had been deleted The Sanders campaign sued the DNC in District Court and concurrently they fired Uretsky. On December 19, the DNC was satisfied that Clinton data had been deleted by Sanders campaign staff, and the Sanders campaign access was restored.