For county and state parties
Every seat on the ballot. Every cycle.
A county party is a permanent organization run by people who rotate through it. Downballot is built for that shape: the work stays put while the volunteers change.
What a committee needs
Built for the organization, not for one officer.
The hardest problem a county party has is not any single cycle. It is that everything learned in one cycle tends to leave with the person who learned it.
- Recruitment you can see the state of
- Which seats are filled, which are open, and who spoke to a prospect last, as a board rather than as an email thread three people are on.
- Turnover as an ordinary event
- Officers change annually. Invite, reassign, remove, and the work stays with the organization instead of leaving in somebody's inbox.
- Institutional memory that outlives an officer
- Notes, decisions and history are attributed and kept. The person who takes over in January can see what happened in June.
- A consent record that survives an audit
- Per channel, append-only, with the date the person actually said it. Not a checkbox the last volunteer to touch the row could overwrite.
Being straight about structure
Nested organizations are being built. They are not here yet.
A state party over its counties, a county over its precinct committees, with a role in the parent granting access in the children, is the shape a party actually has, and it is what we are building toward. It is not in the product today.
- How it works today
- One organization per party committee. Precincts, races and working groups are projects inside it, each private to the people you add.
- What that means in practice
- Separate committees that need genuinely separate membership are separate organizations for now, and a person who belongs to both is invited to both.
- What is coming
- Parent and child organizations, with roles inherited down the tree, including for consent and suppression, so an opt-out recorded at the county binds the committees underneath it.
For your tech committee
The questions you are going to be asked.
- Where does the data live?
- On infrastructure we run and control, with encrypted backups on our own storage and point-in-time recovery. Not resold, not shared between organizations.
- Who can see our records?
- Only members you have invited, at the role you gave them. Access is decided in one place in the database rather than page by page.
- Is it partisan?
- Yes, explicitly. Downballot is for progressive and Democratic organizations and we check applications against that.
- What does it cost?
- Nothing during the beta, and you get at least 90 days' notice before that changes, with time to export and decide.
- Can we get our data out?
- Yes. Contacts and businesses export as CSV today; the Workplan export ships before the beta opens.
Bring your committee.
Tell us which county or state party you are, and what you are using now. We review every Monday and reply within a week either way.