No CommentsNGP VAN is a technology provider to Democratic and progressive campaigns and organizations, offering clients an integrated platform of fundraising, compliance, field, organizing, new media, and social networking products.
NGP VAN counts thousands of campaigns and organizations amongst our clients, including all the national Democratic committees, thousands of Democratic campaigns, and hundreds of labor unions, progressive and non-partisan PACs, and other organizations.
NGP VAN oftentimes powers sites such as ReadyforHillary.com and other progressive campaigns and during a recent hackathon they added a new donation option that campaigns can begin rolling out immediately for accepting donations. That option just happens to be Bitcoin.
Any customer that uses Online Contributions in the new NGP product can enable this feature, and then accept Bitcoin on any contribution page with just the check of a box.
The Federal Election Commission also recently weighed in, ruling that campaign committees could accept Bitcoin contributions of up to $100 per person per cycle.
Ben Mcilwaine the Lead Developer at NGP VAN said, “NGP VAN had a Hackathon earlier in the year for our development teams. My fellow developers and I had the latitude to work on anything we wanted, and my first inclination was to work on political contributions using Bitcoin.”
Ben further went on to state, “I wanted to work on Bitcoin because (a) it’s something a lot of developers, organizations, and companies have been talking about but no one has done yet, and (b) I’m very interested in digital currencies. As my coworkers will attest, I’ve been excited about Bitcoin since before pretty much anyone else had even heard about it. I may have even driven a few coworkers crazy with my talk about the project for the whole month leading up to the hackathon.”
While Bitcoin won’t likely scoot money out of the top spot for political campaign contributions anytime soon having it as an option in such a major platform being used by so many different campaigns will certainly help in the adoption of Bitcoin and add another layer of legitimacy to the cryptocurrency.
The more options that those who chose to use Bitcoin have for spending Bitcoin the more legitimate it becomes, the more options we have for spending Bitcoin the more convenient it is. It is expected that a large number of campaigns using the NGP VAN platform will begin enabling the option for Bitcoin contributions as it simply lowers the barrier for even more people to become involved and make a contribution.
