Political campaigns are a specialized yet lucrative market for IT service providers. New York-based managed service provider Personified is building a playbook for the vertical.

Personified slid into fifth overall among the 2025 MSP 501 with a staff of 22. The company has punched above its weight class with a vertical-focused model that focuses on nonprofits and political campaigns, filling a glaring gap in the political world.

Mike Marotti, founder of Personified, searched long and hard for an MSP when he was senior director of technology operations for Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign. He previously worked as IT director for creative agency Blue State, which designed the branding for Warren's campaign. Marotti was responsible for IT and cybersecurity operations and found little success in finding a strategic IT partner.

“He couldn't find a managed service provider that was around the political sphere, somebody that he could trust, somebody that knew that arena,” Personified CTO Matt Woestehoff told Channel Dive. “So he built one.”

Marotti started Personified in 2021 to serve primarily nonprofits, political campaigns and public office holders. He recruited a team of IT veterans who know the political and nonprofit worlds. VP of Cybersecurity Services Amanda Bennett, who joined the company in 2023, worked in abortion rights defense groups. Woestehoff, who joined in March, is a former city council member and now a campaign manager in his free time.

Demand for outsourced IT services typically emerges at the federal level. 

“At state levels, the need is not quite there,” he said. “We have a handful of federal candidates that we work with, and we have done a couple of presidential campaigns, so we have seen it all.”

Political campaigns typically employ a CTO or CISO who functions as Personified’s point of contact and handles data governance pertaining to donors and voter rolls.

“Our job is really around the endpoints and managing infrastructure and Google Apps. There are other folks to handle applications and specific data structure sets,” he said.

Occasionally, the client needs actual technology, not just tech support. Personified generally leans on a device-as-a-service model for customer offices, but national conventions may task the firm to procure hundreds of devices at a time. Partners help the firm get creative.

“It's not uncommon for massive roll-ups to be part of the conversation, and we just work with folks to figure it out,” Woestehoff said. “We love those challenges.”

Ins and outs of the business

Knowledge of the political vertical is one key to success for MSPs looking to specialize in IT services for campaigns; rolling with its seasonality is another. 

As election cycles progress, partners must embrace change. Personified notes on its website that a campaign may employ up to 30 employees in a single morning when an election is in full swing, then cut headcount soon after. For one client, Personified onboarded 353 campaign workers and offboarded 364 in the same year.

“When it's seasonal and they need to staff up, we staff up with them and take on that workload and grow with them,” Woestehoff said. “When it's the off-season, they go from 200 employees down to five, and we just take care of the five. We have offerings that mix and match with what that need is and help them do good work for as long as they need.”

Identity security is a problem that looms larger for political campaigns and politically-oriented nonprofits than it does for other industries. Many of the employees in Personified’s clients are public figures who are active and visible on social media. They’re also ripe targets for cyber attackers. 

Woestehoff said social engineering is what’s keeping nonprofits and political campaigns up at night.

“That's probably more prevalent than somebody trying to log into somebody's on-prem active directory server — that just is less of a concern these days for most of our clients,” Woestehoff said. 

Politically-focused threat actors are leaning on “phishing, brand impersonation, credential theft and domain abuse” rather than trying to alter vote tallies, according to Check Point’s 2026 U.S. Midterm Election Threat Outlook.

“This is the kind of operational activity that security teams deal with year-round, but they’re now being directed at election-adjacent infrastructure with political disruption as the goal,” Danielle Hess, Check Point Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst, wrote in a blog post.

Political action committees have been targeted heavily. The cybersecurity firm identified 9,500 leaked credentials connected to ActBlue and 6,500 connected to WinRed as of May 2026. 

Personified has leaned on a partnership with digital privacy firm Kanary to help its employees scrape personal information from the internet and lower their attack surface.

“They're usually high-profile people, and they are intentionally public people,” Woestehoff said. “That's where privacy becomes a big priority of, how do we keep personal information as secure as possible, while also letting them do their jobs?”