Community Tech Alliance builds durable data infrastructure for political organizations with Airbyte

Company Size

Under 20 employees

Region

United States (Washington, D.C.)

Industry

Nonprofit / Civic Technology

Sources

ActBlue, Mobilize, StackAdapt, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Salesforce, AWS, and more

Destination

Google BigQuery

Tech Stack

• Source(s): CRMs, donation platforms (ActBlue), organizing tools (Mobilize), digital ads platforms (Meta, Snapchat, StackAdapt), targeting and messaging platforms
• Destination(s): Google BigQuery (GCP)
• ELT: Airbyte (OSS from 2021, Cloud since 2024)
• Transformation: dbt
• Orchestration: Airflow
• Custom Connectors: Built with Airbyte Connector Builder

Key Results

• Built and validated a custom ActBlue connector in about one week, versus an estimated month of in-house API development
• Ran Airbyte as its core ELT tool since the organization's founding in 2021, scaling from self-hosted open source to cloud-managed Airbyte.
• Eliminated the need to build connectors from scratch, including syncs that serve just a single partner, by drawing on Airbyte's extensive connector catalog
• Reduced onboarding friction for new team members with form-based setup that requires learning a workflow, not a new language
• Delivered full data transparency for partners in the election integrity and security space, where traceability of every data source is essential

About Community Tech Alliance

Community Tech Alliance (CTA) is a Washington, D.C. based not-for-profit founded in 2021 to give nonprofits and movement organizations consistent access to data infrastructure and analytics. Its core offering, PAD, is a data warehouse and integrations platform built on Google Cloud that lets organizations store, move, analyze, and report on their data in one centralized place.

CTA exists to break a costly pattern in the nonprofit, political, and advocacy world. "A lot of the boom and bust cycle of the fundraising and elections process means folks build out a data warehouse for three months, and they destroy it at the end of those three months. Then in two years, they do it again," says James Copeland, VP of Product at CTA, who has been with the organization since its founding.

"We really wanted to create an analytics platform that stood historically and consistently across cycles, so that folks could do analysis cycle over cycle, and have that infrastructure exist even when they don't need it.”

Transparency over black boxes: why CTA chose Airbyte from day one

Unlike many teams that migrate to Airbyte from another platform, CTA has run on Airbyte since inception. When the organization launched in 2021, the team faced the classic build versus buy decision for its data pipelines. They started with self-hosted open source Airbyte, then moved to Airbyte Cloud in 2024. "Airbyte has been our de facto ELT tool since inception," says Copeland.

Open source transparency drove the decision. CTA's partners work in election integrity and security, where knowing exactly how data moves is not optional.

"All of the syncs were transparent and visible, and a lot of the other platforms that we looked at have a black box setup. You can see the data that they pull in, but you can't really see how, or what API calls they're making," Copeland says.

"Airbyte allowed that all to be very transparent, and in our space of election integrity and security, it was really important that folks could trace where the data was coming from. That was a big reason why we went with Airbyte."

Today, Airbyte anchors a deliberately lean stack for CTA alongside dbt for transformation and Airflow for orchestration, all feeding BigQuery. "Our pipelines are pretty minimal, because both our platform on GCP and Airbyte are pretty powerful on their own, so we don't do a lot outside of those," Copeland says.

Centralizing a fragmented ecosystem of outreach tools

CTA's partners run their programs across a sprawling mix of CRMs, messaging platforms, donation platforms, targeting tools, and digital ads platforms. Some are enterprise products like Salesforce. Others are niche tools built by one or two person shops inside the progressive ecosystem, tools that mainstream platforms do not support.

"The primary value that we offer is centralizing all these different sources into their data warehouse," Copeland says. "They can track who they made a call to, whether that call turned into a vote or a donation, across the different platforms, now that all their data is centralized in one place."

The BigQuery and AWS connectors see heavy use, along with Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat for partners running digital media programs. For the long tail of movement-specific tools, CTA turned to the Airbyte Connector Builder to create custom connectors for ActBlue, Mobilize, and StackAdapt, several of which are now among the organization's most used integrations.

From a month of development to a week with the Connector Builder

The ActBlue connector, CTA's first custom build, showed what the Connector Builder could do for a small team. Working closely with ActBlue, CTA had the connector developed, tested, and validated across both platforms in roughly a week.

"The turnaround time has been extremely fast. That would have taken a full month for someone to really go through an API and do all the development. We were able to use the easy setup in Airbyte to get that done in about a week.”

Just as valuable is everything CTA never had to build at all. "The biggest thing is we are not building from scratch. The catalog is extremely extensive, so we have a handful of syncs that just have one partner using them, but we didn't have to develop that one sync to support that one partner," Copeland says. "That's one of the biggest wins for us: not having to do the development ourselves, having a platform that we trust, and being able to use the syncs that are already there."

Onboarding a new workflow, not a new language

For a small nonprofit team, ease of use compounds. Because most Airbyte setup is form-based, new team members do not need to develop specialized skills before they can contribute.

"The barrier to entry is easy. There's not a lot of skill you have to develop before you can use the setup," Copeland says. "When doing onboarding, introducing somebody to Airbyte is not introducing them to a new language, it's just introducing them to a new workflow. That's made onboarding and technical setup a lot easier."

Infrastructure that outlasts the cycle

Five years in, Airbyte remains the backbone of CTA's pipeline development, moving data for partners registering voters, raising funds, and running organizing programs across the country. The infrastructure CTA set out to build, warehousing that persists across election cycles instead of being torn down and rebuilt, now runs on connectors the team trusts and did not have to build alone.

"Yes, for custom connectors, we can develop something really quickly. But for things that already exist, the catalog is extremely extensive," Copeland says. "Not having to do the development ourselves has always been the biggest ROI."