Sometimes, a business problem can seem almost unsolvable, at least without a large financial investment and a lot of complicated development. AIS loves rising to these sorts of challenges and creating proof of concepts that are actually remarkably simple, but pack a maximum business impact.
Background
NGP VAN is the leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive campaigns and organizations, offering its clients a wide array of products, including tools for fundraising, compliance, field, organizing, new media, and social networking. Nearly every major Democratic campaign in America is powered by NGP VAN, including the Obama campaign’s voter contact, volunteer, fundraising and compliance operations in all 50 states.
Challenge
The political data industry serves a wide variety of customers with many complicated business requirements. NGP and VAN were, at one point, two separate companies, each with their own product lines and data systems. Although the companies came together in 2011, data islands and gaps in automation between them remain. Many systems cannot be fully integrated for compliance reasons, but still need to work in concert when users make changes within one system or product that impact another.
Solution
With a small team, over a couple of week, AIS was able to introduce “Action Relay”: A deceptively simple, Azure-based application with the potential to bridge the gap between the entire line of NGP and VAN products. Using Cloud-based, instance by instance determination and Azure queuing, Action Relay does exactly what its name implies: When a user makes a change in one instance, it relays the data change to other instances – bridging the gap between all those data islands.
NGP VAN would like an end-to-end implementation of the basic functionality required to relay useful data between the NGP and VAN products. The intention is for this functionality to serve as a minimum viable product (MVP), which can demonstrate the value of a user-configurable data relay solution in the world of political data management. The MVP will relay a limited set of data, subject to filtering logic designed by the user, between a subset of the NGP and VAN databases.
It’s a major election year, and Action Relay is up and running in beta, with plans to extend it to all NGP VAN clients soon. We will continue to work with NGP VAN to extend its functionality into other systems (including Salesforce).
A full-fledged, user-configurable relay system, which allows clients to have fine-grain control of their data and the way that data gets shared with other organizations, or within their own organizations, will have far-reaching impacts at every level of the political data world, and across many different types of organizations. Action Relay, despite its humble architecture, lays significant groundwork for accomplishing this larger vision.
Technology:
Azure