VAN in 2024: Unprecedented scale and performance

Over four months of 2024, the largest, most ambitious voter outreach program in history was set into motion. As fundraising boomed and organizing efforts surged following the transition at the top of the Democratic ticket, NGP VAN’s technology provided unparalleled performance at extraordinary scale. 

For more than two decades, VAN has been the scalable, secure, distributed voter file solution that serves as the backbone of Democratic and progressive organizing. And as each election cycle has evolved and intensified, the demands on voter outreach technology have grown exponentially, as well. But the 2024 cycle was different.  

Heading into our first post-pandemic Presidential cycle, a significant increase in usage of voter outreach technology was to be expected as organizing efforts on the ground returned in full force. The transition at the top of the ticket drove a groundswell of support that launched VAN into massive and unprecedented usage territory — but territory that we tested and prepared for. Supporting a record-breaking voter contact program, VAN delivered with unparalleled performance — powering more than 1.9 billion contact attempts and over 3.6 billion API calls with zero downtime and zero incidents in the lead-up to Election Day.  

“We work tirelessly to improve our platforms to power our movement’s critical work. The proactive work we completed over the past four years led to 100% uptime for VAN in the lead-up to Election Day — a performance that supported the most ambitious voter outreach program in history.”

Alex Stanton 
Chief Operations Officer, NGP VAN 

Meeting the moment 

At NGP VAN, we’ve been relentless in our efforts to advance our technology platform to power our movement’s critical work. 15 years ago, we launched the first version of MiniVAN (on Palm Pilots!) to empower campaigns and causes to give Democrats an advantage on the ground to run more efficient field operations. Since then, MiniVAN’s adoption rate has grown rapidly. More than 90% of doors knocked since the beginning of the 2020 cycle have been logged through MiniVAN, clearly designating it as the gold standard canvassing app for progressive field programs nationwide. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged our country, we shifted our focus to developing and launching VPB Connect and strengthening our API infrastructure to support increased usage. As we planned for 2024, we expected to see a massive increase in organizing programs and API usage — and we planned to scale and test well above our projections to ensure we could meet an unrealized yet historic moment once again.  

With that in mind, our team of technologists and engineers identified three major opportunities for us to execute in 2024 to help optimize, strengthen, and stabilize VAN’s performance for unparalleled scalability, reliability, and performance during this election cycle. We adapted to the return of in-person organizing; we supported external software vendors at scale; and we ensured the stability of our platform under an unprecedented system load. 

The return of in-person organizing 

Since 2012, organizing programs have tripled in size. Forecasting against this trend, we expected to see an increase in the total number of doors knocked cycle over cycle.  

During the 2024 cycle, more than 670,000 users used MiniVAN — over four times the number of users from the 2016 cycle. 90% of the 270 million doors knocked this cycle were logged through MiniVAN. Compared to the 2016 cycle, the total number of doors knocked overall increased by 143% — while the number of doors logged through MiniVAN increased by 355%.  

Every single conversation and the data captured at every door is critical. Previously, up to 10% of canvassing data was never submitted due to users not manually committing their results through the MiniVAN Commit page (a slow page that was a common source of customer frustration). To prevent data loss, improve efficiency, and accommodate more traffic, we upgraded MiniVAN by automatically committing data and enhancing MiniVAN’s backend infrastructure.  

Under unprecedented traffic levels, MiniVAN continued to perform well in the hands of thousands of volunteers— syncing hundreds of millions of data points back into VAN efficiently heading into the final stretch before Election Day.  

In addition to all the data being input through MiniVAN, dozens of other apps were constantly pulling and pushing VAN data to help get out the vote. These apps use and contribute mass amounts of data that have to sync seamlessly to conduct efficient operations. That’s why we decided to dedicate additional time and resources to build out our Canvass Response API endpoint and expand our third-party integrations with other progressive software providers.  

Supporting external software vendors at scale 

Over the past decade, a new trend emerged in the Democratic and progressive technology ecosystem. Where before there were a small number of software platforms seeking to provide an “all-in-one” solution, campaigners today can choose from hundreds of applications, most of which solve for specific use cases.  

While the increase in the number of applications has had a positive effect on organizing — as more tools and more specialization catalyzed innovation — a new challenge arose as the usage of third-party products grew: there has been an increased need to integrate tools with systems of record — like VAN — to account for the massive amounts of data flow generated by these third-party platforms.  

NGP VAN dedicated significant engineering resources to expanding its API capabilities to support sustained peak request rates, ensuring rapid and reliable data synchronization. We optimized every part of our API pipeline — tuning performance, refining queries, and building smarter queue management — to handle scale without slowing down. These upgrades made it possible for campaigns to integrate third-party tools and make real-time, data-driven decisions. 

As a result, in the 2024 presidential election, VAN had the capacity to sustain rates of approximately 7,000 API calls per second. Outside of hyper-scalers like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, most software vendors simply do not support traffic at these levels. Nevertheless, VAN continued to perform under immense demands — especially in addressing sustained call rate increases and other critical platform functions at historic levels.  

Ensuring stability under an unprecedented system load 

VAN is critical to the operations of nearly every Democratic and progressive campaign and organization in the country. Our top priority for 2024 was ensuring VAN stayed stable under unprecedented voter contact scale and maintaining system responsiveness while handling billions of voter contact attempts and tens of thousands of concurrent users on the platform.  

To achieve this, we made significant investments in VAN’s infrastructure, including expanding our database and web service hosts. While we explored a full migration of VAN’s workload and infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), we opted for a more measured approach: offloading non-election-critical workloads to the cloud while preserving on-premises hardware for essential electoral functions. This hybrid strategy allowed us to maintain tight control over mission-critical operations while leveraging the scalability of AWS where it made the most sense. 

API methods were continually load-tested and optimized for months in the lead-up to the election to ensure that VAN could support peak API loads. While we knew we’d see unprecedented usage in this cycle, the groundswell of grassroots energy surged early with the announcement of Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy. After the top-of-the-ticket transition in July, traffic levels topped numbers we’d usually only see much later in the cycle. In response, we continued load testing and adapting to ensure we could handle even higher traffic levels during GOTV. 

During this period, the platform scaled to sustain immense levels of volunteer, API, and other traffic. On GOTV weekend, VAN sustained API traffic of more than 2,700 requests per second, and had enough capacity for approximately three times this level. This is well above what many of the largest commercial software platforms tolerate. Throughout the cycle, NGP VAN customers made over 3.6 billion API calls — a record total, second only to 2020, when pandemic-driven phone outreach pushed usage even higher. 

And after three consecutive weekends of record-breaking MiniVAN usage, over 126,000 users knocked doors with MiniVAN (with over 55,000 concurrent users at one point) on GOTV Saturday — the highest number of users we’ve ever had in a single day on MiniVAN. 

All of this proactive work supported over 270 million door knocks, over 1.9 billion voter contact attempts, and over 3.6 billion API calls, with 100% uptime throughout the final months of the election cycle.

While the final election results were not what we had all worked so hard for, we are proud that VAN was a key part in helping defend critical Democratic seats nationwide and providing the stable foundation to power the most ambitious voter outreach program in history.  

What’s next? 

From helping candidates win local elections in the reddest states to flipping state legislatures and powering presidential campaigns, we have a deep history with those who’ve changed history. VAN has powered ballot measures that have raised the minimum wage, protected and preserved abortion rights, expanded healthcare access, and more. While we all celebrated these victories on election night, their impact is realized for years to come as it becomes easier for people to make ends meet, decide what’s best for their health, and change their lives for the better. 

As we look toward the critical elections of 2025, 2026, and beyond, there’s simply no other software provider in the country that is better equipped to support the needs of Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations. In early April, we finished the migration of VAN to a modern infrastructure based on AWS, offering us limitless capacity to further improve VAN’s performance with added layers of security, scalability, and reliability. Now, our platform can handle more data and user activity than ever before — and we can innovate further and faster to deliver new capabilities in record time. By investing early in this migration, we’re able to easily scale for the next record-breaking organizing program for the critical elections ahead. 

We’re relentless in our desire to power progressive change, and as election techniques and technologies continue to evolve, and as voters are more challenging to reach, NGP VAN remains committed to advancing its platform to meet the challenges ahead.  

“Supporting the most ambitious voter contact program in history requires technology that is stable, scalable, and secure. Once again, VAN delivered. While the losses of Election Day are still deeply felt, our movement’s work helped power progressive ballot measures forward in several states, elect Governor Josh Stein and break the GOP State House in North Carolina, protect the Pennsylvania House Democrats’ one-seat majority, and defend critical Democratic seats in Congress, making margins narrower than many expected. We continue to be proud of our clients and partners, fighting on the front lines for democracy, and deeply proud of our team members, who works alongside our clients every day to power the progressive ecosystem.” 

Chelsea Peterson Thompson 
General Manager, NGP VAN