The Challenge
Club for Growth operates across multiple legal entities, each with its own regulatory requirements, donation rules, and financial reporting obligations. They needed a digital platform that could accept donations through four separate payment accounts routed by legal entity, keep every user interaction synchronized with their political donor database in real time, maintain congressional voting scorecards updated each legislative session, and serve over 230,000 registered users through major political events and traffic surges. The Foundation site also needed a complete fellowship program with class-year management, event coordination, and email marketing integration.
Our Solution
FatLab built and maintains the full Club for Growth digital infrastructure across multiple sites. The centerpiece is a donation system that automatically routes payments to the correct legal entity's account based on the donor's selection, including a candidate bundling option that splits a single donation across multiple endorsed candidates. Every donation and user interaction is recorded to the political donor database in real time, with backup systems ensuring revenue is never lost even if the database is temporarily unavailable.
The Foundation site adds a complete fellowship program with class-year management and event coordination. A dedicated staging environment enables safe testing of donation flows before they go live.
What We Built
- A donation platform routing payments to 4 separate legal entity accounts automatically
- Real-time donor database synchronization with backup systems ensuring zero lost revenue
- Congressional scorecard system tracking legislative voting records
- A fellowship program portal with class-year management and event coordination for 300+ alumni
- Over 230,000 user accounts with candidate donation bundling
- 112 web forms across both sites spanning 6 years of programming
- A dedicated staging environment for testing donation flows safely before going live
- A 2026 donation-platform rebuild adding recurring monthly giving, FEC corporate-donation safeguards, per-entity fee accounting, and donor self-service
Project Overview
Club for Growth is one of the most recognized and influential political advocacy organizations in the United States, dedicated to promoting pro-growth economic policies. The organization operates across multiple legal structures: Club for Growth (501(c)(5)), Club for Growth Action (501(c)(4)), Club for Growth PAC, a candidate bundling conduit, and the Club for Growth Foundation (501(c)(3)). Each entity has distinct regulatory requirements, donation rules, and financial reporting obligations.
FatLab has partnered with Club for Growth for over 14 years, building and maintaining the digital infrastructure behind their political operations. The main platform at clubforgrowth.org serves over 230,000 registered users and processes donations across four separate Stripe accounts - the largest site in our portfolio by user count and among the most technically complex by any measure. The Foundation site at clubforgrowthfoundation.org adds a complete fellowship program management system with cohort-based access control, Iterable email marketing, and 72 Gravity Forms.
These platforms are not only high-traffic but also high-risk, requiring airtight security, near-instant scaling, and constant readiness to support national campaigns and media-driven traffic surges, all while meeting strict political compliance requirements.
Custom Applications
Club for Growth's digital platform required purpose-built systems that no off-the-shelf plugin or SaaS product could provide. FatLab designed and built three core applications that handle the organization's most critical operations: processing politically regulated donations across four legal entities, tracking congressional voting records, and synchronizing every user interaction with the political industry's donor database.
Multi-Entity Donation System with 4 Stripe Gateways
Club for Growth operates across four distinct legal entities: Club for Growth (501(c)(5)), Club for Growth Action (501(c)(4)), Club for Growth PAC, and a candidate bundling conduit. Each has its own regulatory requirements, donation limits, and financial reporting obligations. FatLab built a custom donation processing system that routes every payment to the correct entity's dedicated Stripe Connect account based on the donor's selection. The candidate bundling gateway handles the most complex scenario: a single donation split across multiple endorsed candidates, with each allocation tracked independently for compliance reporting.
Eleven donation page templates support tiered giving from $100 through $50,000, with separate flows for logged-in members and anonymous donors, recurring and monthly donation options, and a cart system for multi-entity selections. The entire flow is purpose-built because no off-the-shelf payment solution could handle the regulatory requirements of processing donations across four legally distinct political entities.
Congressional Scorecard System
The site features a custom-built congressional scorecard system powered by 8 purpose-built MySQL tables, not WordPress post types but raw database tables designed for efficient querying of legislative voting data. The system tracks how every member of Congress votes on key economic policy issues, calculating scores by chamber, year, and state.
Visitors can filter by chamber (House or Senate), legislative session year, and state, with sorting by rank, district, party, missed votes, or votes cast. Individual legislator pages show complete voting histories with key vote breakdowns, and a Hall of Fame and Hall of Shame track standout performers. The Foundation site mirrors this scorecard architecture with DataTables integration and an interactive state map for visual legislative data exploration.
CMDI Crimson CRM Integration
The CMDI Connect plugin (approximately 8,500 lines of custom PHP across 21 class files) provides bidirectional synchronization between WordPress and CMDI Crimson, the political industry's standard donor database and CRM platform. Every user registration, login, profile update, and donation on clubforgrowth.org is reflected in CMDI's master database. The system uses a multi-step Person ID (PID) resolution process: cache check, URL parameter detection from email campaigns, CMDI People/Match API lookup, asynchronous donor creation with polling, and a fallback queue for pending transactions.
The entire system is designed so that CMDI failures never block donations or user operations. Stripe payments succeed, and revenue is secured regardless of CRM status, with a queue that uses exponential backoff to handle failed API calls. Twenty-four transaction types are logged to a custom audit table for complete traceability, and three WordPress cron jobs handle queue processing, PID polling, and donation reconciliation.
Rebuilding the Donation Platform (2026)
Through 2026, FatLab re-engineered and relaunched the heart of Club for Growth's operation: the donation platform. The previous flow had served for years, but the organization wanted a modernized donor experience, a payment engine built around Stripe Connect from the ground up, recurring giving, and per-entity financial reporting clean enough to satisfy four separate sets of books. FatLab designed, built, tested, and launched the new system to production - with real donations flowing through it within minutes of go-live.
A Redesigned Donor Experience
The redesigned donate page presents the three Club for Growth entities - Club for Growth, Club for Growth Action, and Club for Growth PAC - as distinct giving options, each with preset amounts, a custom amount field, and a one-tap "Donate Monthly" toggle. Members who log in see the full slate of PAC-endorsed and priority-race candidates and can bundle a single gift across several of them. A running Donation Summary cart tracks one-time and monthly totals as selections change, and on phones a sticky payment bar keeps the call-to-action in view no matter how long the candidate list runs.
The checkout that follows is built on Stripe Elements for PCI-compliant card entry, with a donor information form and a corporate-donation toggle that, when switched on, automatically enforces FEC rules: prohibited contributions to the federal PAC and to candidates are zeroed out and flagged with a compliance banner, while permissible gifts to Club for Growth Action remain. Compliance is built into the interface, not left to the donor to get right.
A Stripe Connect Engine, Rebuilt from Scratch
Behind the page, FatLab rebuilt the payment engine inside the CFG Donations Manager plugin around a single, disciplined Stripe Connect model. A donor's full cart is captured as one charge on the platform account, then split into individual transfers to each entity's connected Stripe account, all tied together so the money is traceable end to end.
Because each of the four entities keeps its own books and files its own FEC reports, processing fees can't be quietly absorbed by one account on behalf of another. FatLab built a proportional fee-allocation system that reads the actual Stripe fee from each settlement record - not an estimate - splits it across the funds in exact proportion to each entity's share of the donation, and assigns any rounding remainder deterministically, so every entity's ledger reflects a true net contribution and the platform stays whole to the cent. Each transfer is bound directly to its originating charge, which lets it settle on day one without the platform having to pre-fund it.
Recurring Giving and Donor Self-Service
The rebuild added recurring monthly donations for the two entities that support them, implemented as Stripe subscriptions that bill directly on each entity's connected account so renewals never have to round-trip through the platform. Donors get a self-service account area where they can review their full giving history - synced live from the CMDI Crimson donor database - and cancel a recurring gift themselves, no phone call required.
For the finance side, every donation carries its allocated gross, fee, and net amounts as metadata visible on each entity's own Stripe dashboard and exports, and the same figures feed a per-entity Stripe Sigma report so each entity's treasurer can reconcile against a single, consistent source.
Tested Like the Money It Moves
Because donations are real money and the donor database has no sandbox, FatLab built an automated, human-in-the-loop test harness that drives the full donation flow in a real browser and pauses for confirmation before any live record is created. Every path was exercised before launch - single-entity gifts, multi-fund splits with their fee-rounding edge cases, candidate bundling, the corporate/FEC toggle, recurring subscriptions, and the returning-donor experience. The platform went live on a low-traffic Sunday morning in May 2026; the first real donor came through within minutes, and the system has processed live one-time and bundled donations cleanly since.
Technical Implementation
Custom Plugin Architecture
FatLab built and maintains 4 custom plugins across the Club for Growth ecosystem:
| Plugin | Lines | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| CMDI Connect (v1.0.6) | ~8,500 | Bidirectional CRM sync, PID resolution, donation recording, failsafe queuing |
| CFG Donations Manager (v0.5.0) | ~3,500 | Single-charge + proportional-fee Stripe Connect transfers, recurring subscriptions, Stripe webhooks, donation analytics, candidate matching |
| CFG Functions (v0.4) | ~500 | Internal reporting, RSVP management, missing vote data tracking |
| CFGF (v0.1.0) | ~200 | Fellowship pending application management |
Theme and Content Architecture
The main site runs a custom theme on Bootstrap 4 with 43 page templates, the most of any site in our portfolio. These include 11 donation page variants for tiered giving ($100-$50K), congressional scorecard displays, candidate endorsement pages, an election results (211KB template), and multi-step event registration flows.
Content spans 7 custom post types (Candidates, Media, Staff, Issues, Polls, Hall of Fame/Shame, Disclaimers) with 455 ACF custom fields across 36 field groups. The media post type includes an automated YouTube thumbnail processor that downloads and resizes thumbnails locally when video URLs are saved.
Foundation: Fellowship Program Management
The Club for Growth Foundation site adds a complete fellowship program management system spanning applications, profiles, authentication, event coordination, and email marketing:
- Year-based cohort system with custom WordPress roles for each class (2020-2025), enabling fine-grained access control per cohort
- Passwordless email authentication - Fellows click links from email campaigns and are authenticated automatically, with source code tracking for attribution
- Profile self-service - Fellows edit their own profiles through Gravity Forms, with changes syncing to Iterable for email marketing segmentation
- Event management with ICS calendar generation, RSVP tracking, and Iterable sync for follow-up communications
- 72 Gravity Forms spanning six years of programming - applications, RSVPs, surveys, feedback forms, and public forms
- 300+ fellow profiles displayed in responsive card grids with modal detail views
- Legislative scorecard system mirroring the main site's architecture with DataTables integration
Gravity Forms at Scale
Across both sites combined, the organization runs 112 Gravity Forms with integrations including Stripe payment processing, User Registration for automatic account creation, Partial Entries for save-and-continue on complex applications, Zapier for external automation, and PDF Extended for formatted document generation.
Plugin Stacks
clubforgrowth.org (50 active plugins):
| Category | Key Plugins | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Custom | CMDI Connect, Donations Manager, CFG Functions | CRM sync, 4-gateway donations, internal reporting |
| Content | ACF Pro + 3 add-ons, Classic Editor | 455 fields across 36 field groups |
| Forms | Gravity Forms + 8 add-ons | 40 forms for registration, donations, surveys |
| Analytics | MonsterInsights Pro + 7 add-ons, Heap | Comprehensive tracking with eCommerce and form analytics |
| Search | Relevanssi Premium | Enhanced relevance-based search for 230K+ users |
| SEO | Yoast SEO Premium | Search optimization |
clubforgrowthfoundation.org (38 active plugins):
| Category | Key Plugins | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Custom | CFGF | Pending fellowship application management |
| Content | ACF Pro, Classic Editor | 129 fields across 16 field groups |
| Forms | Gravity Forms + 10 add-ons | 72 forms spanning 6 years of fellowship programming |
| Data Import | WP All Import Pro + 3 add-ons | Bulk fellow and scorecard data management |
| Analytics | MonsterInsights + add-ons | Google Analytics integration |
Security and Infrastructure
Given the political nature of the work, Club for Growth faces regular hacking attempts and DDoS attacks. FatLab manages the hosting infrastructure and has successfully defended against these threats with the following:
- Cloudflare Enterprise WAF and DDoS protection
- Imunify360 real-time malware scanning
- Hardened WordPress with customized security protocols for political contribution systems
- Stripe test mode across all 4 gateways via wp-config.php for safe development
- Staging environment on a separate staging server for testing donation flows and CRM changes before production deployment
- Daily backups, weekly updates, and full audit trail support for compliance and reporting
The main site runs on FatLab's managed cloud infrastructure on the East Coast with Relevanssi Premium search and conditional script loading. Donation JavaScript, Swiper, and carousel libraries only load on pages that use them. FatLab provides continuous security monitoring and maintenance to keep these high-profile political platforms protected through election cycles and targeted attacks.
Results and Impact
This is the most technically complex build in our portfolio. The challenge wasn't building a website. It was building a political operations platform that processes donations across four distinct legal entities, synchronizes every user interaction with an external CRM in real time with failsafe queuing, maintains a legislative voting database with custom MySQL tables, manages a multi-year fellowship program with email marketing integration, and serves over 230,000 registered users through election cycles, media surges, and targeted cyberattacks. Every piece was purpose-built because no off-the-shelf solution could handle the regulatory and operational requirements of a political organization at this scale. Over 14 years, FatLab has kept these platforms stable through every political season.
Results
- Over 230,000 registered users across the main platform
- 4 Stripe Connect gateways processing donations across distinct legal entities
- Bidirectional CMDI CRM synchronization with zero-loss failsafe queuing
- Congressional scorecard system tracking legislative voting records with 8 custom database tables
- 300+ fellowship alumni managed through cohort-based portal with Iterable integration
- 112 Gravity Forms combined across both sites
- 14+ years of continuous partnership through major political events, traffic surges, and cyberattacks
- 2026 donation-platform rebuild launched to production: recurring monthly giving, FEC corporate-donation safeguards, and proportional per-entity Stripe fee accounting