Lessons learned from building political tech
Amanda Coulombe, NGP VAN’s outgoing President, reflects on 14 years of building political technology
Welcome to Campaigner, a weekly newsletter exploring the tactics that drive winning political campaigns and highlighting the players pushing the buttons. Produced by Arena & FWIW Media.
This week’s Campaigner is a bit of a departure from the nuts and bolts of running a political campaign, and instead we’ve decided to focus on a less understood topic that touches on nearly every campaigner’s job. Over the past two decades, technology - whether for organizing, fundraising, or communications - has become central to how campaigns are run.
That’s why we decided to speak with Amanda Coulombe, the outgoing President of NGP VAN, the largest provider of political technology on the left. After 14 years leading the company’s political organizing products, which are used by nearly every Democratic campaign field organizer, she announced today that she’s leaving the company, which will be in good hands with incoming General Manager of NGP VAN, Chelsea Peterson. Amanda granted us an exit interview of sorts, reflecting on how the political tech ecosystem has changed over the years, why it’s important to listen to users when building tech, and what she sees as the most important channels for reaching voters in 2022.
But first…
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Q&A with Amanda Coulombe on building political technology
Campaigner: Why don't you start by telling us about how you got started in politics?
Amanda Coulombe: The origin story is that I really just grew up in it. My father was a firefighter and ultimately became Fire Chief of the town I grew up in, and my mom was always active - first on the town finance committee and later on the Board of Selectmen. Now she's actually been the Town Moderator for like 25 years. At the dinner table, we always talked about what was going on in town, and what were the things that my parents and my family were doing to make that better. I think that was really ingrained in me from a very young age.
In college, I applied for an internship at the statehouse and got it, which was really my first taste of how politics works, and I later got an internship on the campaign side for John Kerry’s re-election in 2002. That was when I realized that I really like this whole thing - talking to voters, volunteer engagement, recruitment - and after that, his presidential campaign started spinning up. I got a job doing coordination and recruitment for the presidential campaign dragging people up to New Hampshire to knock on doors, and that’s how I got hooked!
Campaigner: And now you have been building campaign technology at NGP VAN for over a decade - first as a product manager, and most recently as President. How have you seen political technology evolve over the past 10 years?
Amanda Coulombe: It’s actually 14 years, which is wild. I joined the company in the middle of the 2008 election, and I think I've actually seen a couple of big waves of change in the political tech space.
2008 to 2012 was sort of the establishment and professionalization of technology really being central to campaigns. When I started, NGP VAN was finishing the rollout of VoteBuilder (VAN) to all 50 states. Our My Campaign tool was just being built. The products were very much a tool for campaign staff, that staff were sort of wrapping their arms around and saying that okay, as an organizer, data person, or tech lead on a campaign - this tool is meant to make my job much more efficient. It became a central piece of the puzzle for campaign staff in different jobs.
Then, by the time we reached President Obama’s 2012 reelection, everything became focused on the analytics department, and how data was getting reflected back into not just our platform but different parts of the campaign program. I think the focus at that time was very much on how are we using technology to make our jobs easier to leverage the power of being able to aggregate all of that data and use it for better targeting and outreach. From my perspective, that period was really internally campaign-focused.
Starting in 2015, and later coming out of the 2016 election, I think the biggest shift I've seen is to focus more on the supporter or volunteer as the user. How are we building technology for volunteers and utilizing technology to expand the pool of people that are able to engage in these campaigns that we're running. Obviously, technology is still central to the people who are working on campaigns, but I think that that focus has shifted.
I'm gonna use the opportunity to preach about [our mobile canvassing app, MiniVAN] because I always do. Look at our arc of MiniVAN adoption over the last decade. We've had so many conversations and fights over the years with organizers and campaign staff about mobile canvassing vs. paper lists. So much came down to change management. I think for us, it just allowed us to be really focused on building an experience that supporters get really excited about, and that’s really intuitive for them. It also means it needs to be easy enough to use for anyone to use. The other stakeholder in that is the organizer. They shouldn’t have to spend hours and hours training volunteers on an app or product in order for them to pick it up and use it.
That’s probably the biggest thing I’ve seen over the sort of long arc of my career here, is seeing technology go from a thing that just some people used to now a central piece of infrastructure for campaign staff and volunteers alike.
Campaigner: That’s also evident in NGP VAN’s acquisition of Mobilize, right? It’s a tool that’s fundamentally volunteer and user-facing. Shifting gears a bit, I’ve seen many political tech startups come and go over the years, building apps or tools that no one really asked for. Can you talk about how you have prioritized user feedback and listening to the community as you build out products?
Amanda Coulombe: Absolutely. I think that’s one of the things that has made working on this product and this job most interesting over the years. I spent five years being a product manager and then later product director for organizing tools. I’ve always felt that as I shifted more into the business strategy side of things as General Manager and then President, that experience gave me this foundation of being hyper-focused on building a product that is actually serving people and that people are hopefully delighted to use, and making sure we are using a continuous cycle of user feedback to inform our roadmap.
There are obvious struggles with that too. Being the central platform for Democratic and progressive campaigns and organizations, we have tens of thousands of users, especially around GOTV weekend and Election Day. Across all of our products, we’re sometimes talking about people who are more focused on compliance and fundraising versus organizing versus digital. We have everyone from super high-level digital users who are trying to run sophisticated programs every day, to a single person wearing every hat on a campaign who is just trying to get their email out.
So I will just start by saying that this is something that I think we've gotten a lot better at, especially in terms of which personas or customer profiles we’re focused on at different times in the election calendar or cycle. Balancing the needs and user experience of a national tech administrator or an analytics director - as opposed to a digital consultant, a compliance consultant, or volunteers - is part of the challenge. I think it can be very tempting to sort of bounce from project to project, but the products that I'm most proud of are the ones that we've continually gone back to refine, and our ability to stage work so that updates are iterating and building on each other.
It’s critical to have a deep understanding of “why are we building this?” “What problem are we trying to solve? What outcome are we trying to help drive?” Our users and customers drive that. Winning elections is obviously the most important, but so is how they do that and how they're able to actually operationalize all of the work that they're trying to do through our platform.
Once you release a product, I see that as a start - not the end. We constantly need to be going back and pressure testing and listening for feedback. Just last week, we released MiniVAN 9, which involved a very in-depth user experience survey coming out of the 2018 and 2019 elections. Of course, COVID happened, but over the last six months, we were able to go back to that project. For that project, one of the major things we learned in 2020, but started building in 2018, was the real need for tools and features to support distributed organizing and shiftless organizing. The fact is that campaigning is really starting in earnest to break out of that traditional staging location/campaign office model, and we want our tools to support that. We’ve now reached over 90% MiniVAN usage to paper lists, which I’m so proud of.
It’s important to approach every product with the knowledge that you're never going to get it one hundred percent right the first time or even the second time. But actually, the most important thing is that you're creating a sustainable feedback loop with your users and with your customers, so you can constantly be learning and refreshing and taking that feedback into the next thing you build.
Campaigner: As someone who has been an organizer for a large statewide program, and has worked on the tech side, what do you think are going to be some of the most effective or most-deployed channels for reaching voters this cycle? Will it be phones? Texting? Door-to-door?
Amanda Coulombe: I think some of the channels that are really fascinating to me are some of the messaging platforms that have been used in the past, but a little different. WhatsApp is really interesting. In 2020, we heard so much about organizers in Iowa reaching out to activists via Twitter DMs and things like that. But to me, the broader trend is in campaigns just thinking more about what is actually the best platform or the most effective way for organizers or volunteers to be trying to contact you as an individual.
Is that actually a text message on your phone? Is it a WhatsApp message? Is that knocking on your door? That was one of the things that was fascinating to see in 2020 as we all had to make that shift due to the pandemic.
On our end, we made that pivot and built out a new product called VPB Connect in 2020 that ended up getting a ton of usage and we've continued to see be very successful. It’s essentially a web click-to-call tool built on top of our virtual phone bank platform. As you know, campaigns shifted all of their voter contact efforts to phone banking, and most people don’t have access to a burner cell phone. Most volunteers wouldn't want their personal line showing up in caller ID, so by building this click-to-call platform, campaigns could set the calling number to at least a centralized number. It also solved for accessibility issues, as some potential volunteers may not pay for an unlimited personal cell phone plan.
I think the next steps for that would be to build text messaging into that. Many people don’t check their voicemail anymore, so being able to send follow-up messages through the web interface would be great.
That really gets to the heart of what I'm talking about: campaigns need to have tools and technology that are flexible enough and integrated enough so that they can contact individuals on their own terms. Channel message optimization.
Campaigner: Last question - What are you most proud of having achieved?
Amanda Coulombe: On a personal level, I'm leaving feeling very much like I did a good job as a partner to our customers, to our clients, and to sort of be a good steward for the role that our platform plays in the space. And to always be driving towards that outcome of helping campaigns win. I think the other huge thing that I'm super proud of is actually bringing good people into the space and into the company. When I look around at NGP VAN, I think the talent that we have are just super smart, kind, and incredible colleagues, I'm incredibly proud of being able to leave that sort of behind as part of my legacy. The last thing, which some people will probably disagree with this, but I think I've managed to make it this far and not turn into a total asshole. Oh yeah, and reaching over 90% adoption for MiniVAN too. 🇺🇸
Arena Highlights
Amanda talks about how campaigns are starting to adopt messaging voters on platforms like WhatsApp. Check out our WhatsApp tool to learn how to organize with the platform>>
Amanda talks about how from 2012-2015 targeting and analytics were a big focus on campaigns, and still are to this day. Check out our Canpaign Targetting tool>>
That’s it for Campaigner this week! If you enjoyed reading this issue, give it a share on the socials! 🙏