Table of Contents
Political campaign tools are the bedrock of any campaign. The amount of data each campaign has at its disposal and how it uses it to manage resources effectively, target potential voters, and conduct outreach can (and usually does) decide the outcome of elections.
What can be confusing is that most tools offer multiple services or, like CallHub, are ‘all-in-one’ platforms meant to handle most aspects of your campaign. But crucially, not all.
This list will give you all the details you need to know about the best political campaign tools currently on the market, the best way to use them, and what special features each tool offers for each requirement—like data analysis, volunteer management, etc.
If you go through the entire list and pick all our favorites, you will be fully equipped to run a campaign of any size and scale. You also have options to compare them as well. Here’s the political campaign tools guide you were looking for.
Political campaign tools: CRMs
NationBuilder
NationBuilder combines a content management system and customer relationship management software into a single package. It features a range of political campaign tools that help with website design, fundraising, organizing volunteers, and social media.
Campaigns can easily add functionality to their campaigns through more than 50 app integrations in the NationBuilder marketplace. Plus, it gives you access to free voter files.
One-line review: Must have for large, nationwide campaigns with many different requirements – from outreach to fund management to volunteer staffing and voter tracking.
Highlights:
- Build interactive, responsive websites (themes available).
- Customizable volunteer pages so people can organize on your behalf.
- Donation processing and tracking of progress.
- Advanced segmentation using filters and tags to identify the right people for outreach.
- Send emails and track metrics like opens, clickthroughs, bounces, unsubscribes, and spam reports.
- Permission sets that let you customize your control panel for different types of volunteers based on their role.
You can start with a basic plan of $34 per month, move up to a $160 ‘pro’ plan, and, of course, get customized plans based on your needs.
NGP VAN
NGP VAN is a leading technology provider for Democratic and Progressive campaigns, offering fundraising, compliance, field, organizing, digital, and social networking products.
NGP VAN helps you set up a website and provides tools to organize and track your fundraising, set up real-life events, and manage your volunteers.
The system also has an extensive voter data collection system that allows your campaign to run analyses and microtargeting campaigns – which most customers love the CRM for.
One-line review: Perfect for mid-sized, on-ground campaigns focusing on voter management and outreach.
Highlights:
- Makes it very easy to identify potential voters for your outreach campaigns.
- Offers many resources like names and addresses, maps, and directions to homes of potential voters.
- Extensive mobile integration means you can dramatically reduce paper usage in the field.
- Makes canvassing significantly easier as a focus of your campaign.
- Manage volunteers and supporters and create branded sign-up forms.
You can start with a basic plan of $45.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is perfect for those who need an in-depth relationship manager built around communications and emails. One of its key features is automation – autoresponses based on conditions, automatic contact management, and entire nudge/flows for communication.
The CRM also allows you to add notes to contacts, set up meetings and calls with voters, send direct messages to them, and much more.
One-line review: Ideal for campaigns where outreach is more needed than voter management. The high level of automation for communication gives a major boost to outreach efforts.
Highlights:
- Marketing automation is extra powerful because of the in-built CRM system that integrates smoothly.
- Easy-to-use flowchart-style automation builder.
- Allows you to set up landing pages, send SMS to voters, and even manage ad displays on social media from the same platform.
- Has an amazing 94.2% email delivery rate, one of the best in the business.
You can get a basic CRM plan for $45.
Political campaign tools: Outreach
Phonebanking: CallHub
CallHub calling tools for political phone banking power everything from manual dialing campaigns to high-volume dialing using automated dialers. Campaigns can choose a dialing mode that aligns with their goals, whether long personal chats with high-value donors or high-paced GOTV campaigns.
The tool integrates with popular campaign CRMs like NationBuilder, NGP VAN, Action Network, PDI, and Salesforce so organizers can sync voter lists, surveys, and events in real time between tools.
Through the mobile app or by logging into the application through a browser, volunteers/agents can make calls from the comfort of their homes. Agents can access phone banking scripts, surveys, individual contact details, and detailed interaction history with each contact to add context to each call.
One-line review: A multi-tool platform with powerful calling software that allows great flexibility for campaigns as needs grow during the campaign run. Integrations and automation allow superior follow-up to calls.
Highlights:
- Predictive Dialer, Power Dialer, and Auto Dialer options for calling campaigns.
- Main and sub-accounts for distributed organizing.
- Integration with data vendors like L2 Political to access high-quality voter data for targeted segments.
- Voice broadcasting for high-volume audio broadcasts.
- Patch-through calling to connect voters to decision-makers.
- Unlimited contact uploads and free agent seats.
- SHAKEN/STIR registration
- Spam label shield
- AI-based sentiment analysis
- Text via CC
You can access all features in a pay-as-you-go format, ensuring you pay for what you use rather than a lump sum every month.
Other options:
PhoneBurner: The software allows you to load in your calls either manually or in bulk through a CSV file, add tags, pre-load emails as autoresponses, and several other features. It also provides analytics, call recordings, and integrations with CRMs. You can get set up with a $127 monthly subscription.
GetThru: Started by veterans of Bernie 2016, GetThru is designed specifically for political campaigns, educational institutions, and non-profit organizations. It features a high calling rate (claimed to be 250 calls per hour) and offers strong customization depending on your data. Calls begin at 4.5 cents per dial.
Texting: CallHub
CallHub texting tools lets organizers reach large groups through mass texts, grow their list through text-based opt-ins (Eg. Text CALLHUB to 33339) and initiate action through one-to-one text conversations (peer-to-peer texting). It also comes with analytics that help you keep track of how your texts are received, response rates, and opt-outs.
Campaigns can use lists from their CRMs and use the text-to-join tool to add more supporters and build authentic relationships via text.
When the context does not require a conversation (general updates and last-minute reminders), text broadcasts take the burden off the campaign.
When you want to have open-ended conversations at scale, peer-to-peer texting is the tool of choice.
One-line review: CallHub combines multiple texting channels under one roof, so organizers can easily manage contacts and activities across teams. Reaching out to audiences of any size through texts is easier and for a low cost.
Highlights:
- SMS Broadcast, SMS Opt-in, and Peer to Peer texting under one roof.
- Trigger-based automatic responses can collect data and offer more information (for example, the address of an event or the link to a donation page) without human intervention.
- Pre-saved templates for faster responses.
- Uses data from your database to personalize texts.
- AI-based profanity filter to ensure your agents do not have to face abuse from contacts.
- A powerful mobile app for agents to use for peer-to-peer texting conversations and even calling campaigns.
- The ability to send MMS at scale and for a low cost.
- Gets your 10DLC number and Shortcodes registered as required by the campaign.
- It offers a URL tracker/shortener for branded links so that you can track interactions on those links.
- Helps keep your contact lists ‘clean’ through list scrubbing.
- It keeps you compliant by giving your contacts an automatic opt-out for every message you send. Additionally, it keeps you safe through a global DNC list for all campaigns.
- There is no limit on the number of contacts you can upload.
You only pay for the texts you send. 3.4 cents per text from a 10-digit number. 5 cents per text from shortcodes.
Other options:
TextP2P: An easy-to-use service that lets you import contacts, set up workflows, and create automatic responses. It has a mobile app as well for personalized conversations, and makes bulk messaging as simple as “upload and send”. You can start with $21 a month.
EZ Texting: This is an advanced text outreach tool with features like web sign-up forms, link shorteners, and a Shutterstock integration for MMS. An old guard among political campaign tools, this is also among the more expensive. It would cost $100 a month for such features.
Emails: ActiveCampaign
As mentioned above, the true strength of ActiveCampaign is the email client it offers. This political campaign tool offers advanced tagging to sort email segments, sequences of automated replies with multiple options, and a built-in Zapier integration to integrate hundreds of other tools from CRMs. All for a reasonable price.
Along with ‘drag and drop’ email templates, a unique offering is their ‘conditional content’ feature that allows you to show different contacts different content through the same email campaign.
One-line review: Rated highly for its easy of use and superior deliverability rates in emails, this tool is an affordable option for those looking for advanced email campaigns.
You can get started with $49 a month for unlimited emails to 5000 contacts.
Other options:
MailChimp: Among the most famous email marketing services in the world, they offer excellent segmentation, scheduling, and email design. Even their free version (if you have less than 2000 contacts) is highly rated. A highlight is their strict policies on spam and the ease of running parallel campaigns. You can send 6000 emails a month for $13. But prices increase to $139 for 150,000 emails a month.
Email Octopus: Among the cheapest solutions if you want to send out hundreds of thousands of emails every month, Email Octopus using Amazon SES to send the emails, while still providing you with plenty of advanced features. Features like email journeys for new subscribers, variable content for different segments of your contact list, and a drag-and-drop template editor. The pricing is dynamic, but you can expect to be charged about $54 for 150,000 emails a month.
Political campaign tools: Relational organizing
CallHub
CallHub’s relational organizing tool allow you accelerate the response to your text and phone banking campaigns, by engaging the personal contacts of your volunteers. Volunteers can call or message their own friends and family on your campaign’s behalf from within the CallHub ecosystem, using the relational organizing app or browser.
Additionally, the system syncs with your existing contact database and automatically flags contacts matched in your volunteer’s personal contacts – so those not already in your database can be automatically added to that volunteer’s calling campaign.
One-line review: CallHub’s relational organizing app allows volunteers to leverage their personal connections easily, enhanced by features like a dynamic script, surveys, tags, and automated follow-on messages or calls.
Highlights:
- Volunteers can amplify your cause by sharing it on their social media.
- Volunteers reach out to their contacts through texts, calls, and social media.
- Volunteers can use the app in English, Spanish, and French.
- All relational organizing outreach reports and analytics are in one place.
The app is free for use for CallHub’s customers.
Other options:
OutreachCircle: This app is a “friend-to-friend” outreach platform with a unique automated voter file matching system to identify target voters. It works on Android and iPhone as well as mobile browsers and desktop browsers. Supporters can contact anyone in their network, or use the mapping service to match their friends against the campaign contact database. It costs 1 cent per message to start with.
Impactive: Used by organizations like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, it has a full political campaign tools suite with a powerful relational organizing feature. The app makes grassroots campaigning easier by using crowdsourcing to gather contact data from volunteers.
Political campaign tools: Voter files
L2
L2 provides high-quality voter data to election campaigns, political consultants, and PACs. L2 voter files hold datasets on state and county-level registered voters, US census data, election return data from every county in the US, telephone files, and lifestyles and issue data on individual voters.
L2’s VoterMapping product allows campaigners to perform voter analysis, filter from thousands of voter demographics and donor categories, and export targeted voter lists. You can also integrate this tool with political campaign tool suites like CallHub.
One-line review: With close to five decades of experience, L2’s 53-point data file on each voter remains an industry-standard in terms of comprehensive knowledge on potential voters.
Highlights:
- Comprehensive online database of voter, consumer, predictive non-voter, constituents and consumer records.
- Access to a massive range of voter and consumer lists, including there details like address, phone numbers and email IDs.
- Self-service tool allowing you to make selections, pull counts/reports, and download the records you need.
- Choose from hundreds of filters including demographic, voter, consumer data and modeled behaviors.
- Claim to have the details of 210 million voters, making them among the most in-depth in the industry.
Please get in touch with L2 for pricing. You do get a free trial.
Other options:
Aristotle: This is a data management tool for political campaigns that specializes in data-mining voter data. The software is used by senatorial and congressional campaigns, Democratic and Republican state party initiatives, PAC’s and grassroots organizations.
The Aristotle product line also includes fundraising, donor management, and compliance reporting software. You will have to send an email to get pricing.
Target Smart: Target Smart maintains voter data containing the demographic, financial, and lifestyle information of more than 200 million consumers in the United States. It also maintains data sets on mobile phone numbers, precinct-level election results, and political contributors.
Along with their data and products, Target Smart offers professional services that include polling, predictive modeling, strategic consulting, and communications. Pricing is based on your usage, and customizations.
Political campaign tools: GOTV canvassing
ECanvasser
ECanvasser maximizes returns from field operations by equipping agents with the means to collect and analyze relevant polling data. The Ecanvasser app makes it easier to manage field activities through intelligent maps to find voters and track canvassers in real-time.
Its integration with NationBuilder allows campaigns to plug into Ecanvasser for outreach work and voter correspondence.
One-line review: With features like team management, area assignment, field tracking, and even a ‘build your own custom app’, ECanvasser is the premiere GOTV canvassing app among political campaign tools.
Highlights:
- Create walk lists based on address or geographic coordinates.
- Feed talking points to canvassers, including campaign messaging and directions.
- Collect survey responses.
- Analytics to identify stronghold areas and main issues and track campaign activity in detail.
You can start with a basic $99 a month plan, but realistically, most large campaigns will need the $599 per month ‘pro’ package. But they do offer other plans as well.
Other options:
Organizer: This is a field outreach platform for Democratic and Progressive candidates making it easier for a campaign to manage face-to-face contacts with voters.
Organizer allows campaigns to create dynamic scripts, divide neighborhoods into different zones, and assign volunteers to canvass those zones through a drag-and-drop interface.
Organizers can also see the data entered into the smartphone apps in real-time, visualize those results through different graphs, and export them to other systems.
Though the price is not listed, it is estimated to cost around $29 a month to use.
VolunteerMark: This app enables volunteer outreach and recruitment for political campaigns. Once your campaign begins door-knocking, this canvassing software will ensure easy personalization of accounts and communication between teams.
Campaign leaders can schedule canvassing events for volunteers and choose between one-time, fixed, or flexible timings for every canvasser.
Pricing starts at $34 per month for unlimited volunteers and unlimited events.
Political campaign tools: PAC management
Aristotle
Running a political action committee (PAC) comes with its own challenges, and you will need software to help you navigate the meandering halls of regulations, filing requirements, and tracking of lobbying efforts.
Aristotle is unique in that it provides these services matched with decades-long experience in political campaign tools. It provides features like support to file paperwork across all fifty states, references and updates for relevant government policies and affairs, legistative data and fundraising management at a federal level.
One-line review: As a pioneer in political data science, Aristotle’s PAC services allow a smooth 360-degree overview of all your lobbying efforts and nationwide fundraising services, giving you the broad scope you need to run a PAC.
Highlights:
- Aristotle’s mobile app lets you record interactions with legislators, track bills and votes, and search for and find information through your phone.
- A lobbying report allows lobbyists to remotely record their interactions into a searchable database for the management of lobbying efforts.
- Special compliance support systems make sure you file the required papers at all levels in every state.
- Appropriate information on legislation helps you keep informed about the issues you need to track.
The price is on request.
Other options:
Trailblazer: This campaign manager can be used to create, implement, and track all voter touchpoints for targeted voter outreach. Features include Campaign Fundraising, Text to Give, FEC Compliance Reporting, Mobile canvassing, Grassroots advocacy, and Constituent management. Though it has many other features for political campaigns, the PAC section is geared for the special compliance needs of a PAC. Price is on request.
Quorum: This software is geared towards making it easier to file donation records with the FEC or with state election commissions. It also helps you manage transactions and reconcile accounts through the software. Uniquely, this also offers a tracker using Federal Election Commission data, letting you benchmark your own performance when compared to other PACs. Price is on request.
Political campaign tools: Volunteer management
Mobilize
Mobilize includes a full suite of features for managing your campaign’s volunteers efficiently while maximizing their impact. An under-rated gem among political campaign tools.
Other than the usual things like signing up volunteers, assigning them to teams, and helping define the tasks they have for the day, features include things like:
- Pre-event notes and post-event surveys.
- Access to their network of volunteers (which they claim is over 2 million).
- Allowing local event creations so volunteers can sub-host their events for your campaign.
- Relational recruitment, allowing volunteers to look for more volunteers among their peer groups.
- Extensive and in-depth analytics to measure the progress of each volunteer.
Price is on request, though you can sign up for a free or limited trial that lets you host five small events.
VolunteerHub
VolunteerHub divides your volunteering activities into multiple sections, such as recruitment, scheduling, tracking, and database, giving you solutions for each one.
This hyperfocus allows you to have specific goals and track each stage of a volunteer’s cycle in your campaign while building an effective database. So, from the day they sign up to the day they leave, you maximize their impact and ensure appropriate follow-ups are sent to them for future opportunities.
Features include:
- Branded landing pages for each volunteering opportunity.
- Customized onboarding to allow volunteers to be teamed into groups based on skill levels or interests.
- Automatic notifications and reminders for events for volunteers.
- Creation of recurring events so the same volunteers can be contacted each time.
Prices begin at $143 per month for 1000 volunteers.
Political campaign tools: Analytics
Civis Analytics
Civis Analytics originates from an analytics tool built for the Obama 2012 campaign, ‘Optimizer,’ which paved the way for the campaign’s big win.
The Civis Platform interface integrates voter data from multiple sources and appends it using Civis’s proprietary database of 230M+ Americans. It lets campaigns use that data to learn what matters most to voters at a zip-code level.
At a technical level, this is a very complicated database into which you feed huge amounts of raw data. The database then helps you understand patterns and gain insight into your next move.
A unique feature is their testing tool for media content from a campaign. Campaigns can know how a message performed, measure potential backlash, and understand which subgroups were most receptive to each creative. Think of it as A/B testing on steroids.
One-line review: The Civis Political Subscription gives campaigns immediate access to high-quality forecasts and models for every race, from national down to a single congressional district. A must for those looking for in-depth political campaign tools.
Highlights:
- Supports data from various sources and CRMS, such as Salesforce, Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge, NGP VAN, MySQL, Google Sheets, etc.
- Enhances your contacts with hundreds of person-level data attributes from a million nationwide survey responses.
- Uses AI to maximize the value and utility of all the data insights you have fed the system.
Price is available on request.
