What is the first fundamental problem Activist Manager solves?

Data. Every group’s data is inevitably segmented into a series of separate and incompatible silos. Direct mail donors in one database, e-mail lists in another, online fundraising in yet another. Even getting the vendor data into these silos usually requires complex, expensive and fragile batch import routines that have lag times measured in weeks. The end result is a group that never has a complete grasp of their operations and can’t accomplish all they could with better data.

What is the second fundamental problem that Activist Manager solves?

The cutting edge applications that are redefining politics are usually completely cut off from real time access to the group’s data. Online fundraising is often done without real-time access to the donor’s history and social media campaigns cannot access the existing activist lists - the list goes on. Without bridging the divide between cutting-edge applications and legacy data systems neither can really reach their full potential.

So, how does Activist Manager solve these problems?

Activist Manager identifies the most common tasks in any political technology project and wraps them as simple SOAP based web services. There’s an API call for processing an online contribution, caging a direct mail check, checking donor history and more. Best of all, the data from all these API calls is placed into a single database - in real time. That means your next API call has access to the most up-to-date data from of every part of the group.

How does Activist Manager benefit my coding?

Outstanding applications are written by programmers with an in-depth understanding of the technologies they create in. The Activist Manager API abstracts away much of the complexity outside of those core competencies. For example, if you are writing an iPhone App that allows donations - you probably don’t want to deal with the complexity of the Authorize.net API, PCI security audits or tapping the donor database to retrieve the giving history. Instead, you can handle all of those tasks with a few simple calls to the Activist Manager API. Now, you are free to focus on what you are best at.

Will Activist Manager work with Ruby/Perl/Python/Objective-C/CGI/Java/PHP etc?

The API is offered as a series of SOAP web services. So if your languages can securely communication with SOAP, (and almost every major language can), you can work with Activist Manager’s interfaces without a problem.

Sounds good, but I want to play with the product. How do I do that?

Contact us at partner@activistmanager.com. We will send you a complimentary copy of the standard Demo Agreement (It does not obligate you to use Activist Manager ). We will then send you the complete documentation for the API and establish a database for your own fictitious group.

What about technical support?

Each partner is responsible for providing its clients with technical support for their products. We provide unlimited tech support to those partners to help them understand and work with our API.