Liberty Concepts*
Company Review Rating
Ben Cardin (D-MD), New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Jim Pederson for Senate (AZ)
Liberty Concepts was started by Jonathan Karush after he worked for the U.S. Department of Labor and volunteered for the Democrats in 2000, supporting former Maine Senate President Mark Lawrence.
Liberty Concepts was started by Jonathan Karush after he worked for the U.S. Department of Labor and volunteered for the Democrats in 2000, supporting former Maine Senate President Mark Lawrence. After his work with Lawrence, Karush launched Liberty Concepts to "provide complete Internet solutions to nonprofits, campaigns, public officials, advocacy organizations, unions, PAC's, and academia." The company offers a proprietary content management system, database development, online fundraising, and strategy consulting, and works closely with the DCCC to serve more House campaigns than any other company, totalling 45 campaigns in 2006. "The House is our big niche," says Karush.
Liberty Concepts features its own proprietary content managements system, called Liberty Campaign Manager. Karush's goal was to make the software as easy to use as possible. It includes a text editor that looks like Microsoft Word, thus requiring little to no programming experience. In addition, Liberty Concepts offers a plugin for Microsoft Word that makes it easy to post content directly from Word.
Liberty Campaign Manager is a web-based ASP client, so users can access it from anywhere with Internet access. It takes an a la carte approach to technology solutions, offering modules specifically built for discrete tasks like letters-to-the-editor, e-precinct building, and more.
Liberty Concepts also features a tight integration with NGP Software -- there is about an 80% overlap in their client base. Per their agreement, for clients using both vendors, NGP handles all personnel database and contributor data and Liberty Concepts handles the software front-end.
- Victoria Wilsun, who ran for Congress in Ohio in 2006, used VicTree, a public record of voters who pledged to vote for Wulsin in the form of an expandable Flash tree that branched out as more people signed on to the campaign.
- Tammy Duckworth for Congress' campaign in Illinois raised $200,000 using a Flash movie campaign developed by Liberty Concepts.
In the next year Liberty Concepts will be expanding beyond offering CMS solutions to House campaigns, and will launch affordable and customizable solutions for local candidates. It is also actively building out fundraising systems in Second Life, the game-like virtual world that is experiencing a growing amount of political campaigning. In addition to web development, Liberty Concepts provides graphic design and political consulting -- Karush estimates that 60% of Liberty Concepts' work is web development for political and advocacy campaigns, and the other 40% consists of consulting and other work.
NOTE: As a relatively new company, Liberty Concepts had too few responses in our December 2006 user survey to produce meaningful ratings.
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