Custom Development for the Benefit of the Progressive Movement
How VoteAmerica is working with Action Network to drive historic voter turnout in 2020
Early September is a busy time for VoteAmerica, an Action Network partner and nonprofit organization that’s working tirelessly to drive record-shattering voter turnout for the 2020 election. In the home stretch to November, they are focused on making sure the most vulnerable voters in the United States can access trusted election information, open platform technology, and education programs to exercise their right to vote.
“We want to use technology to remove all the barriers that voters have to voting,” Nick Catalano, Director of Technology at VoteAmerica told me this week. “We want to make up for where states aren’t there yet from a tech perspective and offer a full online flow that allows people to request an absentee ballot, register to vote, or check their registration status, for example.”
“The development projects I go to Action Network for are things I think make sense for the broader tech community.”
In the process of shoring up VoteAmerica’s suite of digital tools, Nick and his team noticed a gap in the technology that would require some development to fix.
“We needed SMS added to the API,” Nick explained. I asked him to describe the challenge in layman’s terms, and he humored me.
“Previously, it’s been possible for an organization or software developer to build an automated way to subscribe people to your email list in Action Network,” he explained. “After Action Network created functionality that allows blast mobile messaging, there was not a way for a user to automatically opt-in a phone number to the mobile messaging program.”
Given the importance of blast mobile messaging to VoteAmerica’s program and recognizing the urgency of the need, Nick weighed his options.
“We could have done the development manually ourselves, but that would have eaten into a lot of our staff time and wouldn’t have been as reliable,” Nick explained. “We could have waited until it came up on the roadmap, but that wasn’t going to happen within our timeline. We wanted this before the election cycle was over.”
Nick decided to approach the Action Network team about fixing the issue as a custom development project.
“The development projects I go to Action Network for are things I think make sense for the broader tech community,” he said. “If there’s a feature that’s a big hole, and I know it can be filled, and it’s also identified by Action Network as a hole, we’ll pay for the custom development to get it done.”
Nick and the Action Network team, including Action Network Director of Technology Jason Rosenbaum, created a plan to complete the custom development project in three months. They finished a month early, giving VoteAmerica a jump start on its programming around the 2020 election.
“Now, with this custom development, it is possible to, at the same time, opt someone into your email list and also add their phone number so that they can be opted into mobile messaging lists,” Nick told me.
This improvement means that progressive organizations can more seamlessly build their mobile messaging lists and mobilize supporters to vote.
“We’re very glad that we’re working with Action Network,” he added. “We saw a small part that could make our program much better, and we asked for it to be made, and it was a very reasonable cost for us. It was definitely worth it.”
Visit VoteAmerica.com to learn more and sign up to use VoteAmerica’s full suite of tools built to register voters, drive historic turnout, and ensure voter protection on Election Day.
This project with VoteAmerica is an example of Action Network’s cooperative, partner-driven approach to building technology with and for the progressive movement. By building mobilization tools alongside our partners, we develop the infrastructure the progressive movement at large needs to build power.
Do you have a custom development project you’d like to explore with the Action Network team? Contact Action Network Product Manager Mari Vangen at Mari [at] actionnetwork.org to learn more.
