At NGP VAN, we’re focused on ensuring organizers have reliable, scalable tools that help them fundraise efficiently, reach voters, and win elections. That requires more than great software — it demands infrastructure that’s reliable, interoperable, and ready for the demand that’s needed to win in every election.
For years, NGP VAN has served as the backbone for tens of thousands of campaigns and progressive organizations. But as the ecosystem has grown more complex, one thing has become clear: no single platform can innovate fast enough alone. Real innovation in campaign tech doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens when great ideas connect — when tools and platforms work together to meet organizers where they are.
That belief sits at the heart of our new Integration Partner Program: a deliberate investment in making NGP VAN more open, predictable, and partner-friendly — so that together, we can deliver the innovation organizers and campaign staff need to win.
Why partnership matters
Before joining NGP VAN to lead the engineering team in June of 2025, I spent years building campaign applications and integrations on top of VAN to help organizers and finance staff. As an independent software builder myself, I found this challenging. I’d often have to jump through many hoops, from navigating an opaque API approval process to reverse-engineering front-end code to build Chrome extensions — to achieve a truly integrated experience with VAN, which is what customers yearn for. It was often unclear which team at NGP VAN was responsible for developer support when I needed it.
A pivot toward partnership
For many years, NGP VAN sought to be the one-stop shop for campaigns — a single place to handle everything from organizing to fundraising. That model made sense when the ecosystem was less mature, but as it evolved, it in turn limited the ways external partners could integrate with VAN and build alongside it.
The new approach driving the Integration Partnership Program recognizes that organizers need both reliability and flexibility — a stable core platform paired with the ability to integrate specialized tools that meet their unique needs. It reflects a deliberate shift in how NGP VAN invests: more resources dedicated to supporting partners, clearer processes for integration, and a renewed commitment to interoperability. The goal is simple — to make it easier for innovators across the ecosystem to connect their work to VAN and deliver more value to organizers on the ground.
Partnership as a distribution network
One of the biggest reasons I decided to join NGP VAN was the platform’s reach and widespread adoption across the movement. Nearly every organizer has worked in VAN, logged in with ActionID, and used it to manage core parts of their program — it’s the shared infrastructure campaigns depend on every day.
That reach matters for partners too. Sustained distribution is one of the hardest challenges for independent software vendors in political tech, where every cycle brings new tools and new players. By opening the VAN ecosystem more intentionally, we can help great ideas find traction faster and give organizers access to more innovation without starting from scratch.
The Integration Partner Program formalizes that vision: a way for partners to connect into the infrastructure campaigns already rely on and reach the organizers who use it daily.
What the Integration Partner Program delivers
The Integration Partner Program turns partnership into a clear, reliable process — with real engineering and operational commitments behind it. We’ve built the program around five core principles: access, transparency, reliability, security, and visibility.
- Clear agreements and expectations
- A formal Partnership Agreement and Integration Partner Addendum outline rights, responsibilities, and benefits — so everyone knows what to expect from day one.
- A formal Partnership Agreement and Integration Partner Addendum outline rights, responsibilities, and benefits — so everyone knows what to expect from day one.
- Engineering support from start to launch
- Dedicated implementation and testing support help partners move from sandbox to production smoothly and ensure integrations are ready for peak campaign periods.
- Dedicated implementation and testing support help partners move from sandbox to production smoothly and ensure integrations are ready for peak campaign periods.
- Security and review transparency
- Partners receive clear, prioritized security reviews and accelerated approval timelines — letting partners plan with confidence and reach production faster.
- Partners receive clear, prioritized security reviews and accelerated approval timelines — letting partners plan with confidence and reach production faster.
- Visibility and marketplace access
- Partners can showcase their integrations directly within VAN, making it easier for campaigns to discover and deploy trusted tools.
- Partners can showcase their integrations directly within VAN, making it easier for campaigns to discover and deploy trusted tools.
- Predictable scaling and rate limits
- Published classifications and throttling guidelines make system behavior transparent, allowing integrations to scale safely and sensibly.
Building for the future
For years, the VAN API has worked reliably and scaled without limits, however that focus came at the expense of expanding the API for what was possible. The Integration Partner Program marks a shift toward doing both: keeping VAN dependable while making it more open and extensible for partners.
We’re also looking ahead to how new interoperability standards and emerging technologies will shape campaign work in the years ahead. Concepts like Agentic AI and Model Context Protocol (MCP) are quickly redefining how systems exchange data and automate workflows. By strengthening and expanding VAN’s APIs now, we’re ensuring the platform can securely support those kinds of innovations as they move from experimentation to everyday organizing. We’re expanding our software engineering team with a focus on building out new APIs to support work loads. Here’s the link to our announcement.
Supporting reliability and innovation
For the movement to thrive, two things must be true:
- Reliable, dependable infrastructure for all
Campaigns and partners count on VAN to perform reliably, even during record-breaking election cycles. Published endpoint tiers, rate limits, and 429 rate-limiting practices give teams the information they need to build resilient integrations.
These limits have been designed to balance fairness and flexibility — high enough to support nearly all integration needs while ensuring stability across the ecosystem. VAN has long had a rate-limiting policy, but enforcement wasn’t previously applied in practice. We’re now activating and publishing those limits to bring consistency and transparency to how integrations scale, aligned with best practices used by other large-scale API platforms like Twilio, Stripe, and Salesforce.
We know some partners may need to adjust their implementations to align with these new tiers. To make that easier, we’ve partnered with DDx API, a product of the Democratic Data Exchange (DDx), whose VAN API Proxy can help conform existing integrations to the new standards with minimal code changes, and whose other APIs may be helpful in accelerating adoption. In coordination with our team, the DDx API team will directly assist partners with onboarding along with providing associated documentation and support. Learn more about the DDx API here! - Operational support for innovators
Reliability also means making it easier for partners to build, test, and maintain their integrations. Through dedicated implementation support, sandbox environments, and prioritized troubleshooting, we’re helping innovators reach production faster and stay stable through high-volume periods.
Together, these efforts create the foundation for a healthier, more collaborative ecosystem — one that supports both the reliability campaigns depend on and the innovation the movement needs to grow
How to get started
If you’re building tools for campaigns at scale, we’d love to collaborate.
- Independent software vendors (ISVs):
Review our Partnership Agreement and Integration Partner Addendum to access implementation support, prioritized reviews, tiered limits, and marketplace benefits.
Contact [email protected] to begin. - Technical teams:
For architecture guidance, testing, or endpoint classification details, reach out to [email protected]. - Early-stage partners:
We aim to ensure our partnership program supports rather than prohibits new upstarts from building innovative tooling. Explore our free tier for validation with real campaigns and access to developer support as you scale.
What’s next
The Integration Partner Program is just the beginning of a broader investment in partner infrastructure. We’re building a team to expand API access and capabilities, improving provisioning workflows and continuing to enhance the developer experience.
These efforts reflect a long-term commitment: to make VAN more open, reliable, and resilient — because organizers deserve dependable infrastructure, and innovators deserve a supported path to scale.