Partisan vs Bi-partisan Vendors

The question of partisanship comes up frequently when we talk to prospective and current customers. The underlying question in all these conversations is,

why do I care that Crimson only serves Republican campaigns and organizations?

 You should. In terms of winning and losing, do you want your fees being used by a company to advance a product that could or will be used by your political competitor?It used to be that political fundraising was all about your list, i.e. your contacts who were previous donors. The better your list, the more money you could raise and the quality of your list was your competitive advantage. Because of the importance of your list, you would never let it leave your possession, let alone store it at a company that might intentionally or unintentionally leak it to your competitor or the competing party.In the current computing environment, campaigns are far more comfortable uploading and managing their mission critical data into the cloud. We all now use services like Gmail, Google Docs, iCloud, DropBox, etc, to store and share our work. We use Visa/Mastercard to process our donations and Microsoft to manage data. We don't care if these tools are Republican or Democrat. These are big, mass market software solutions that will live or die based on the adherence to privacy policies. If they leak data, they will face severe penalties or go out of business.Partisanship becomes more important when a political campaign is looking for a competitive advantage. Political specific software such as NGP, Aristotle, Piryx, CompleteCampaigns, and our own beloved Crimson are all tools campaigns use to to win campaigns.In the grand scheme, all these political software companies are small when compared to Google, Apple or Microsoft and they are dependent on their clients winning to stay in business. To win, these companies have to innovate so they can provide the best possible tools to their clients. Makes sense, right?But, if you are a bi-partisan company, you are taking Republican revenues to make advances to your product in ways that could be used by Democratic campaigns and visa-versa. Literally, the fees your are paying this campaign season could be used to improve the product for your competitor in 2014.This alone makes me very uncomfortable.Does a bi-partisan company really care if you win or lose if they are providing services to your competitor? By choosing a partisan vendor, you are assuring yourself that their interests are very closely aligned to your own. Not only are they serving you in exchange for fees but it is important to the partisan vendor that you win your race.Take-away: make sure you are taking partisanship into consideration when you make your next political software buying decision.