Dem Strategists Bet on New Compliance Reporting Software
A team of veteran Democratic strategists are rolling out what they hope will be the first real competitor to the compliance reporting software that has dominated Democratic politics for decades.
The new platform – dubbed Operative – is designed to be a streamlined alternative to NGP VAN’s widely used compliance reporting tools. The goal, according to one of Operative’s founders, isn’t to mimic all the features of NGP VAN’s software, but to give campaign compliance specialists a simpler platform to upload, clean and file their reports with the Federal Election Commission.
Operative is still in beta testing, said Pete Kavanaugh, one of the company’s founders. The company plans to open the software up to public adoption sometime in April – first for PACs and then, eventually, for campaigns and other committees.
“If you do a side-by-side comparison, NGP has a lot more bells and whistles,” Kavanaugh told C&E. “That’s great for some users, but we’re taking a very different approach, which is to simplify and streamline the entire compliance and reporting process. What we found in our research and testing is that users don’t want a tool that’s overly complicated when it doesn’t need to be – they want a reliable tool that is going to help them do their jobs more efficiently and effectively.”
A Democratic Campaign Behemoth
NGP VAN – named from the 2010 merger between NGP Software and Voter Action Network – is the private company that runs the Democratic Party’s voter database, organizing and compliance tools. But the company’s dominance in the space has become a sore spot among some Democrats in recent years, especially since it was acquired in 2022 by the private equity firm Apax Partners.
Operative is an intended answer to years of frustration among some party operatives and compliance specialists, who say that NGP VAN’s compliance reporting tools have become overly complicated and somewhat clunky.
“If you’re a longtime user of NGP, you know it inside and out,” Kavanaugh said. “There’s often a lot of comfort in that, but it also means you’ve probably had the same frustrations with it for years, which should cause some warning signs.”
Kavanaugh, who founded Operative along with Democratic operations expert Joey Pacific, said that the company is well aware of the challenges of breaking into the political compliance reporting market. Compliance specialists have used NGP VAN’s tools for years, he acknowledged, and might be reluctant to switch to a new platform.
But he’s hoping that the simplified reporting process – and an expectedly lower price tag than NGP VAN – will help convince users to adopt the software.
“Driving adoption of a new product is always going to be a challenge, especially when people are so comfortable with the current options that they’ve used for a long time,” he told C&E. “That said, we know there is a big opening for a solution that saves campaigns and compliance professionals significant time and money, and there is a real understanding in the ecosystem of real value that tool would provide.”
