Late last week, political tech giant NGP VAN, responsible for helping Mr. Obama manage his two successful campaigns for presidency, announced their plans to do something unheard of in the political tech world: acquire another political tech company. NGP VAN will be onboarding D.C.-based NationalField, an online, social network-like startup founded by Obama backers to provide analysis of real-life volunteers and their political action.
Democrats constantly preach the digital divide, and this is just another example of how they are leveraging progressive technology to their advantage. NGP VAN has long used technology to boost Democratic candidates, most recently including Terry McAuliffe in his winning the Virginia gubernatorial vote earlier this month.
But this union means all-encompassing campaigning. NGP VAN President and CEO Stu Trevelyan told Politico the acquisition is “like peanut butter meeting chocolate.” While NGP VAN directly fuels candidates with data about their campaigns, NationalField gives the lower-level participants a network to better back the candidates on the ground. Now that they're both under one roof, they have the entire campaign paradigm covered.
Founded in 2008 as an arm of the Obama campaign, NationalField has since spun off into a full-time political-tech startup, an emerging trend in the political world. “When we started in 2008, the idea of a tech startup born on a campaign was one person at his desk … with an Excel spreadsheet, and that person would disappear for three years or a year and come back when the cycle started again,” NationalField Co-Founder Edward Saatchi said. “Now there’s kind of a boom of political tech startups, especially on the progressive side.” In today's campaigns, you just can't wait any longer.
With the acquisition coming shortly before 2014's upcoming mid-term elections, this kind of total-picture campaigning will have a great chance for validation. The idea is that by the time the 2016 presidential election comes around, the NGP VAN-NationalField team will be fully seasoned and on the cutting edge of campaign technology.
The two parties did not disclose any of the details on the deal.
