NGP VAN unveiled an expanded tie up with Revolution Messaging this week as the company continues to promote its platform’s integration capabilities.
NGP VAN’s Mike Liddell said the goal of the company’s integration platform was to foster new relationships with vendors and other firms in the Democratic tech space. As more vendors plug into NGP VAN’s platform, the company can work to centralize all the data from a campaign’s voter interactions across its spectrum of channels.
“We’re in a unique position in the industry where we can talk to a lot of the folks who are out there and get folks moving in the same direction, and that’s what we wanted to do with our innovation platform — make it easy for people to have a way to communicate with us,” said Liddell. “We’re starting to see a lot of the fruits of that labor now.”
Revolution Messaging was “a perfect fit,” he added. “They’re one of the bigger ones [that NGP VAN has partnered with], and one of the ones where there’s been the most excitement around for a lot of our users because they’re using it as well.”
Revolution Messaging has partnered with NGP VAN since September 2012, but the latest move was billed as a “true integration” between NGP VAN’s Online Actions tool and Revolution Messaging’s Revere Mobile platform.
Here’s how it works: when a targeted voter signs up on an NGP VAN form, say a petition, or a volunteer sign up, and agrees to receive mobile messages, that data automatically goes to Revere. The person then receives an opt-in, and all their interactions — donating, signing the petition, agreeing to volunteer — are shared between the two platforms.
Some Democratic technologists have been critical of NGP VAN for not allowing new tools to plug into its interface. Dan Johnson, CEO of the compliance and fundraising startup Campaign Filer, recently called the company “a walled garden.”
“There is a demand for seamless integrations with [the innovative] applications that are coming out for team blue, and that’s what we’re hoping to sell,” Johnson recently told C&E.
NGP VAN’s Mike Liddell called that criticism old news: “That used to be something that was truer a few years ago. We’ve seen a ton of companies come on board. We have over 200 companies who have integrated with us in some way or another,” he said. “We’re starting to see that there’s lots of companies that want to integrate.”