Support That Scales: How CTA Powered Partners Through 2025 (and Into an Election Year)
By: Ben Deverman
Given the importance of our partners’ work, timely and comprehensive support is a vital part of CTA’s services.
Over the course of 2025, our team handled everything from quick fixes to complex, technical questions. Here’s a snapshot of what that support looked like:
510 tickets were submitted and resolved
About 35% of these were quick, “one-touch” requests - made possible by CTA’s quality-of-life features that help users get back to their work quickly
Our average response time to tickets was 2.5 hours, far exceeding industry standard service levels
Our knowledge base, NotePAD, received several hundred views, helping users easily find answers to commonly asked questions
These numbers reflect not just volume, but our shared commitment to being responsive, reliable, and easy to work with, especially during the most critical moments of the cycle.
We also see this as an opportunity to pull back the curtain a bit and share how CTA approaches customer support more broadly.
Async-First Support
Asynchronous support for our partners is the cornerstone of our support model. We’ve developed multiple ways for our partners to get answers on their own time:
NotePAD - Our extensive knowledge base, with articles, how-tos, and best practices curated by our team.
Status Page - A simple, lightweight way for partners to sign up for outage notifications or alerts impacting their data or tooling.
Freshdesk Ticketing - Accessible by sending questions to help@techallies.org, allowing partners to submit tickets and our team to track them.
Why does this matter? We want partners to be able to support themselves using the resources we provide. Each of them moves at different speeds throughout the year - some are focused on early-year membership drives, others are laying the groundwork for summer canvassing, and many are laser-focused on Election Day in the fall. Async support ensures help is available when it’s needed, without forcing anyone to slow down or work around rigid schedules.
Rotational Support Model
CTA is a small but mighty crew; we bring together experience from both politics and the private sector. As we built our support systems, one thing was clear: support shouldn’t be owned by a single person or team.
To maintain both speed and quality, while also prioritizing our core values, we use a rotational support structure centered on two key roles (and yes, they have frog names):
Hopperator: Responsible for intake and triage of incoming tickets. This role doesn’t resolve every issue directly. Instead, Hopperator functions like a phone operator, routing requests to the right team and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
Prog Lead: On the engineering side, Prog Lead rotates among team members. While continuing work in development sprints, the Prog Lead is available to support Hopperator, answer technical questions, monitor systems, and respond as needed.
Rotations for each role shift weekly, with formal handoffs between team members. This shared responsibility approach allows us to be thoughtful about how we provide support, avoid burnout from too much work, and give partners access to timely, knowledgeable help.
The support we provided in 2025 ensured our partners were able to focus on the work that matters. As we head into a critical election year, that level of support matters more than ever.
Our goal isn’t to just resolve tickets - we want to continue empowering partners’ work, ensuring they can keep programs moving, particularly during their busiest and most high-stakes moments of the year.
We’re proud of the support we provided in 2025 and are looking toward the horizon on how we can improve in 2026.