About MVP

Problem: Most political spending is a wasteful, inefficient gamble.

• Candidate campaigns are like “sandcastles,” leaving nothing behind to build on. Staff and volunteers parachute in at the last minute. Consultants launch poll-tested ad blitzes. Once votes are cast, campaigns turn off the lights and sell off their email lists — rinse and repeat.
• Donors take their gamble and leave empty-handed. Glitzy candidates with slim chances and clever emails raise millions, lose by landslides, and end up with millions in unspent funds. 
• Quick-fix tactics turn off voters and erode trust. Many campaigns and PACs use spammy fundraising tactics that exploit donors. And billions of dollars go to ads with diminishing returns and no lasting impact, reinforcing a transactional and cynical view of politics.

Solution: Invest in year-round organizing to maximize impact.

• Community organizers are the best voter mobilizers. Research shows that “relational” outreach by trusted messengers moves voters to action more reliably than ads, cold calls, and mailings. Why? Because they have credibility and know what issues and messages resonate.
• Organizers build bottom-up power that can grow over time. They bring in volunteers, develop leadership, and engage their communities year-round, building political influence that lasts.
• Organizers fuel the fight for democracy and progress. Elections come and go, but organizers mobilize communities en masse to hold officials accountable and enact policy priorities.

Funding enables organizations to do their work. Capacity building lets them achieve more with the resources they have.

MVP’s Capacity Building Program gives our partners the tools, skills, and support to strengthen, sustain, and scale their work. Our team has created a network of capacity-building providers to tailor support to hundreds of state and local organizations. 

Our program offers support in four major areas: 

• Data, Tech, and Systems: Through our Tech Stack, we offer free or discounted access to tech platforms for voter data, voter contact (text, phone, and door), voter registration, email marketing, relational organizing, analytics, and more.
• Leadership Development: Through an extensive network of professional providers, we offer coaching, trainings, and intensive cohorts in areas such as team leadership, organizational development, fundraising, and more.
• Communications and Narrative: We offer and connect our grantee partners to tailored coaching, training, and support around strategic communications, narrative and messaging development, and crisis communications.
• Safety and Security: In the face of growing threats to on-the-ground organizers’ safety and security, we offer both proactive planning and rapid response support around political violence, hacking, infiltration, and more.

The stakes are too high to work in siloes or duplicate our efforts.

Our opponents have created a superior movement model — what we call the vertically-integrated meta church (or more simply: a MAGA super-movement) — in which everyone on their side, from billionaires to politicians to media to youth activists to regular people, operates as a cohesive team. The Democratic side writ large, by contrast, is siloed, fractured, and tactical (as opposed to strategic or transformational). To counteract this dynamic, MVP works closely with our partners and allies on all levels to:

• Coordinate movement-building, organizing, and voter engagement strategy.
• Facilitate the sharing of resources, information, strategy, and best practices.
• Reduce duplication of effort and other inefficiencies.
• Allocate funding and people power strategically across key places and races.