Effective campaigning in 2024 means bringing together a wide array of tools to bridge the physical reality of running a field program and digital demands of brand awareness, fundraising, and mass communication, often wrangling data that is both overwhelming and quickly-outdated. Political campaigns are almost always understaffed, underfunded, and out of time.
This is a (growing) curated collection of high-quality platforms, tools and resources for running political or advocacy campaigns.
- Advertising
- Call Tools/Auto Dialers
- Canvassing
- CRM/DRM
- Data
- Fundraising
- Media Creation
- Media
- Organizing
- Security
- Social Media
- Texting
- Website Builders
- Open Source Tools and Resources
- Democratic Ads - Self-service ad platform offering voter-targeting advertising with microtargeting in all 50 state. Integrates natively with NGPVAN.
- Facebook Ad Library - Facebook's repository of all ads. Great to use as a resource for inspiration and to monitor opposition messaging/spend.
- Google Advertising Transparency Report - Google's repository of all political advertising published through the Google Ad Network, including YouTube ads.
- Snapchat Political Ads Library - Snapchat's repository of political ads. Downloads as a CSV with links to the creative.
- Facebook Political Ads Collector - Python collector for the FB Ad Library API.
- CallHub - Powerful calling platform with auto/predictive dialers, patch through calling, and live call monitoring. Also offers broadcast/p2p texting and email tools.
- PhoneBurner - Another powerful calling platform with auto/predictive dialers, automation tools, and many integrations.
- ThruTalk - Fast caller that offers strong integration with ThruTalk.
- callTime - Fundraising-focused call tool with ActBlue and NGP integration. Enriches donor data and uses machine learning to generate donor scores and ask amounts.
- Ecanvasser - Streamlined tool for turf cutting, walk list generation, and field reporting. Has native integrations with NationBuilder, CallHub, Salesforce, and L2 Data.
- Trailblazer - Platform with canvassing, mailing, and phone banking tools. Offers mapping and turf cutting with geocoding for an additional fee.
- CiviCRM - Self-hosted, open-source CRM for donor and volunteer management. Alternative (with a bunch of elbow grease) to NGP. Large ecosystem of extensions and mature, well-documented REST api. Native integration with Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla.
- Action Network - Low-cost CRM/DRM platform with organizing tools and bulk email/SMS. A good subset of NGP's tools at a fraction of the cost. Priced by emails/month.
- EveryAction/NGP VAN - One of the most widely-used CRMS, especially in political campaigning. Unmatched toolset for ease of use, especially for filing disclosure reports, but expensive. Their data enrichment tends to be the best.
- ActionKit - Another Bonterra offering. Where EA/NGP prioritizes ease-of-use, ActionKit prioritizes powerful tooling for data management.
- Aristotle - CRM geared toward donor management for political fundraising and compliance. Has a wide variety of data sources to enrich contact data.
- NationBuilder - Another popular CRM that has both advocacy and fundraising tools. Much cheaper than NGP/EveryAction.
- VolunteerHub - CRM geared towards recruiting, managing, and scheduling your volunteer base.
- L2 - Data broker that has been around for a long time. Offers voter, constituent, and consumer data sets.
- TargetSmart - Provides high-quality voter, constituent, and donor data, as well as turnout and issue-support models.
- Political Data Intelligence - Broker with a wide range of high-quality political, electoral, and advocacy data sets. Also offers polling.
- Accurate Append - Offers political data lists as well as data enrichment, lead validation, and contact profiling.
- Catalist - Enriched national voter file with matching tools. Data is improved by sharing back program and response data from clients. Also offers many different behavior, demographic, and issue-preference models.
- Grassroots Analytics - Data and tools for progressive campaigns and non-profits. Offers list rentals for some use-cases.
- Civis - Very powerful data analytics platform. Allows you to create complex automated data pipelines and offers language-agnostic scripting, preconfigured Docker environments, GitHub integration, and connectors for dashboards like Tableau and Google Data Studio, and data warehouses like AWS Redshift and GCP BigQuery.
- Civitech RunningMate - Data visualization software for constituent and supporter data.
- Stripo.email - Hybrid WISYWIG/code editor for email production. Lots of quality-of-life features, like device preview, asset hosting, and export to many different ESPs. The editor itself feels kind of clunky/limited but code can be edited simultaneously.
- Numero - Fully-integrated donor database and call-time tool. Streamlines call-time operations with donor contact enrichment, generated asks, one-click follow ups, and integration contribution forms.
- democracyengine - PCI-compliant payment processor for political donations, charities, and non-profits. Offers credit card and e-check processing.
- FundraiseUp - Donation platform with page-building features similar to ActBlue.
- Bannerify for Figma - Generates HTML5 banner packages from Figma designs. Includes basic animation, hover states, lottie files, generating backup images, generating GIF/video versions, and injecting clickTags for major DSPs.
- Creatopy - Canva but for banner ads. Has a large repository of templates and includes some useful widgets such as audio, YouTube embeds, and countdowns.
- HTML5toGIF - Web service to convert HTML5, SVG, and Lottie to GIF/Video. Absent generating video locally from FFmpeg, this tool produces the highest quality exports of all the tools I've used. Excellent for converting HTML5 to video for Facebook ads.
- Cision - Media monitoring and relationship management (MRM) platform. Maintains database of traditional media and social influencer contacts and includes integrated pitching tools.
- Mobilize - Widely-used and powerful event management tool. Part of the Bonterra family.
- Empower Project - Suite of relationship organizing tools that is free for 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations. Integrations natively with NGP VAN/EveryAction and offers a robust API for importing and exporting data.
- Defending Digital Campaigns - Non-profit that offers cybersecurity training, resources, and products at low-to-no cost to Federal campaigns.
- 1Password For Democracy - Cross-platform password manager for teams, free for political organizations.
- Gather Voices - Supporter testimonial platform that integrates recording, editing, and distribution.
- Mobile Commons - Broadcast SMS tool used by many non-profits, that has interesting features like polling locators and surveys.
- Strive Messaging - Broadcast SMS platform with automation, semantic interpretation, and sentiment analysis tools.
- DaisyChain - Broadcast texting tool with powerful automation features and integrations with many major advocacy tools.
- Hustle - The original P2P texting tool. Also offers broadcast texting, video messaging, and a dialer product. Integrated into the VAN.
- RumbleUp - P2P texting platform with strong list cleaning features.
- ThruText - Hustle's little brother. No minimums or contracts, credits are bought in blocks.
- OutreachCircle - Relational organizing platform with inexpensive P2P SMS. Offers NGPVAN integration.
- Civitech TextOut - Texting platform that offers both managed and unmanaged texting.
- RUN! - Candidate website builder for Dems and Progressive candidates that offers sliding scale pricing.
- PoliEngine - Candidate website builder with fairly run of the mill templates but also very affordable pricing.
- Campaign Partner - Website builder that's been around for a while. Features include online donations, event management, and a basic CRM.
- move-coop/Parsons - Fantastic python utility library that makes it easy to interact with the APIs of many common campaign tools, like NGPVAN, Mobilize, and Hustle. Connectors abstract Requests and Parsons Table wraps petl with a bunch of quality-of-life methods for getting data in and out of various formats.
- ActBlue Connector for AirByte
- dedupeio - Python library that uses machine learning to perform fuzzy matching, deduplication, and record-linking.
- Open States Bulk Data - State legislature data for upper and lower chambers in each state. Has data on legislators, bills, and votes. Bulk data and API available.
- FEC Bulk Data - Bulk data downloads for Federal committees.
- MJML - Responsive email framework that takes the pain out of building good-looking, cross-platform emails. Can be used with a native editor, as a Node.js module, or free-to-use API. Very easy to build the classic 1-col fundraising email layout.
- Can I Email? - HTML/CSS feature reference for compatability and client support. Important to know that 60% of your recipients won't see your slick linear-gradient header, so be sure to set a fallback.
- Archive of Political Emails - Email archive that collects email from candidates, elected officials, PACs, NGOs, etc.
- SimilarMail - General email archive with a lot of political content.
- New York State Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment - NYS legislative boundaries for CD/SD/AD, available in shapefiles.
- NYS Street Address Mapping (SAM) - NYS GIS geocoding service. Typically an exact match for the state voter file.