FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 1, 2012

Contact:
Nathan Thomas - nthomas@dlcc.org
Stu Trevelyan - stu@ngpvan.com

DLCC and NGP VAN Form Technology Partnership

“DLCC Go” to Provide Integrated Web Site Solution and Other Tools to Help Democratic State Legislative Candidates Win

Washington, D.C. (May 1, 2012) — The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) and NGP VAN have partnered to bring state legislative candidates across the country DLCC Go, a unique suite of integrated and affordable new media, fundraising, and field campaign tools that will give Democratic campaigns of all sizes a competitive technology edge.

State legislative campaigns can take advantage of DLCC Go [www.DLCCGo.com] to easily publish a professional web site, send broadcast emails, manage fundraising online and off, and integrate their web site with the VAN field tool most Democratic campaigns use. From Maine to California, DLCC Go lets any state legislative campaign — big or small — take advantage of the best integrated campaign technology available to Democrats. The DLCC has made DLCC Go affordable by negotiating an economy of scale price with NGP VAN, a Democratic campaign technology company.

“Since our inception, the DLCC has worked to make the most sophisticated campaign tools affordable and accessible for Democratic state legislative candidates across the country,” said DLCC Executive Director Michael Sargeant. “Through DLCC Go, candidates now have affordable access to NGP VAN’s advanced online toolkit, including a web site platform that is fully integrated with their fundraising and field tools. These same tools are already used by countless congressional candidates across the country, and with DLCC Go, all state legislative campaigns can now afford them as well.”

“Several years ago, we started an initiative to build out our state legislative program after we realized that there were hundreds of Democratic state legislative campaigns who could greatly benefit from our web site platform and core toolset if we simply made it more affordable and accessible. We’ve had hundreds of campaigns and every active Democratic caucus sign on to our tools in some fashion.” says Stu Trevelyan, CEO of NGP VAN. “This partnership and DLCC Go is an important step forward to helping even more Democratic state legislative candidates get a technology edge.”

For more information, please visit www.dlccgo.com

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About the DLCC. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) is the national Democratic organization responsible for winning state legislative elections. The DLCC is the only political committee in the country whose principal mission is to put Democrats in control of as many state legislatures as possible. We do this by helping to build winning, state-of-the-art campaign committees across the country through partnerships with legislative leaders, professional staff, and grassroots advocates. We provide candidates with access to tools like polling, research, and online activism platforms, as well as other data, field, and communications resources that have become indispensable for modern campaigns.

About NGP VAN. NGP VAN is also the preferred new media provider to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, EMILY’s List, America Votes, and State Voices. NGP VAN counts thousands of campaigns and organizations among our clients, including Obama for America, all the national Democratic committees, thousands of Democratic campaigns, and hundreds of labor unions, progressive and non-partisan PACs, and other organizations. We are proud to provide a uniquely integrated platform that combines the best new media, fundraising, and field products.

Part of our job at the DLCC is help make sure Democrats in all 50 states are ready for redistricting in 2011. But two new web applications are letting everyday citizens try their hand at the process.

Longtime Swing State Project readers are already familiar with Dave’s Redistricting App. Basically, it’s a program that uses existing precinct and demographic data from 43 states to let you redistrict any state any way you want, precinct-by-precinct, and it gives you a real-time demographic breakdown as you build your districts. As a bonus, you get to decide how many districts to draw, so the same program can be used to game out state legislative districts, too.

Dave’s app is extremely addictive, and dozens of redistricting proposals have been popping up at Swing State for months. The program is probably more powerful than anything state legislators had at their disposal as late as the 1991 redistricting cycle, and it puts in sharp relief the enormous impact redistricting has on future elections. It’s so popular that Swing State Project is actually holding a redistricting contest, which we’d encourage anyone to enter.

The second application we want to highlight is much newer, and it comes from Redistricting the Nation. It allows you to check the compactness of every congressional and state legislative district in the country, along with municipal districts in select major cities, according to four objective criteria. After checking different states and their districts, the application lets you draw your own district and check its compactness scores.

Programs like these are helping to open up redistricting to a wider audience than ever before, and considering what's at stake, we think that’s generally a good thing for the health of our democracy.

Matt Yglesias, a blogger for The Atlantic, wrote a post today that I’ve been thinking about a lot.

He attended a presentation on new media given by Rep. Steve Harrelson, the House Majority Leader in Arkansas, at the DLC National Conversation. Harrelson writes a blog called Under the Dome, which just for the record, it is pretty incredible. Matt agrees, calling it (and other blogs like it):

[A] kind of fascinating development that potentially has a lot of promise for state and local officials who don't necessarily have big staffs.

Harrelson is not alone in writing online -- in Virginia, Dels. Kris Amundson and Bob Brink write a really good blog called 7 West; in Idaho, Rep. Nicole LeFavour writes a fantastic blog, which is authentic and honest in a way that I really love; and there are many others.

But often, these leaders are the exception and not the rule.

In his post, Matt describes how the state and local officials in the room were scared about the consequences of being involved online:

All anyone wanted to talk about was fear about what might go wrong on the internet. Could one of my kids write something on their Facebook page that embarrasses me? What if I become the victim of unfair attacks from anonymous people writing online? What about journalistic standards? Wither truth? The whole litany of internet-related fears.

I’d love to say that this is the reason that we developed the DLCCWeb. But in truth, we built it to counter a second set of problems -- making the Internet simple and affordable enough that all of our legislative candidates can build and update their own websites.

Encouraging the mentality to engage in online democracy is a different proposition. But we’re trying. Blog publishing is built right into DLCCWeb, along with volunteer tools, online fundraising, and social network integration. This cycle, several hundred candidates (with a whole range of technology comfort levels) are using the Internet in a way that they haven't before because of this service.

And we're doing our best to take the lessons of the Internet to heart in house and to practice what we preach on this blog.

I’d love to hear some feedback from the people who are reading this. Are we succeeding? What can we do better? Submit a comment or send me an email -- compton[at]dlcc.org.