On a Florida beach, B.R. McConnon III found something Washington would have trouble resisting: a ranking. The subject was political golfers. His response was to consider what would happen if the people on the list actually had to play one another. A charity tournament already existed. Here was a fresh reason to accept the invitation.
The attraction is easy to appreciate. A city accustomed to counting votes could spend a day counting strokes. Members of Congress could compete without drafting legislation, and their competitive instincts could serve an educational cause. McConnon later recalled that the change helped broaden the event’s appeal beyond DDC’s client relationships.
That small episode offers a useful entrance to his career. He founded Democracy Data & Communications in 1996 and spent 26 years leading the business that became DDC Public Affairs. Much of its work concerned a practical question: how do you turn an organization’s relationships into participation? A golf invitation makes the question pleasantly tangible.
Eighteen people, thirty computers
Before there was a company to sell, McConnon worked across the less glamorous machinery of politics: policy analysis, editorial writing, campaign finance, political software and databases. His education was in government and international relations at Georgetown. His early work brought him into contact with the technical demands of fundraising, organizing, compliance and lobbying.
The combination matters. Writing an argument and maintaining a usable list require different skills. Political work needs both. Someone must understand what an organization wants to say; someone must also know which people it can reach and how to reach them. McConnon’s professional preparation crossed that boundary before he started DDC.
The company began as a two-person startup. By March 1999, when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he could describe a business with 18 full-time employees in Alexandria’s Old Town. Its customers included large corporations. Its daily operations depended on nearly 30 computers running multiple software packages.
He was there on behalf of the National Federation of Independent Business to discuss Y2K. The date change had turned a programming convention into a boardroom concern. McConnon explained that he and his chief technology officer had tested the company’s systems. The work took several days and cost several thousand dollars. For a company whose clients needed access to data through the internet, continuity was a business obligation.
It is a revealing early picture: the founder working through tests with the technology chief, then taking the experience to a congressional hearing. Advocacy was already both his company’s service and something he practiced as an owner. The computers had to work before the communications could travel.
A company grows around a database
DDC’s early services included matching ZIP codes to legislative districts, alongside online grassroots and political action committee databases. These are humble descriptions for consequential tasks. Before an organization can demonstrate its political reach, it needs to understand where its people are. Before it asks them to act, it needs a workable way to communicate.
The company’s Democracy Direct product gave that work a technological base. It organized stakeholder information so clients could search, sort and segment it. In his 2005 Senate testimony, McConnon described the system as a proprietary relational database offered through an application service provider model. The technical vocabulary has aged; the underlying task remains recognizable.
That appearance also placed DDC in a more contentious setting. A Senate Indian Affairs hearing examined tribal lobbying, and McConnon appeared voluntarily at the committee’s request. He explained that DDC had supplied data warehousing and later online database management for tribal accounts through Capitol Campaign Strategies and Scanlon Gould. It was a reminder that advocacy vendors operate inside relationships whose responsibilities deserve scrutiny.
As DDC grew, its offering extended beyond software. It added telephone outreach, local partners and political and communications expertise. The business increasingly brought together people who designed technology and people who ran campaigns. A client could need audience research, a website, a field operation and help deciding what to say, all in the same assignment.
In December 2014, Omnicom’s DAS Group acquired DDC Advocacy. The company had about 145 staff at the time. McConnon remained its founding partner, chairman and CEO. For a business established eighteen years earlier, joining the agency network opened a different route to clients and partnerships.
The acquisition brought Democracy Direct into that wider network, along with capabilities ranging from media buying to constituent outreach. McConnon described the combination as an opportunity to expand and continue developing the business. The appeal was distribution as well as ownership: other agencies could draw on what DDC had built.
By the company’s 25th anniversary, his account of DDC emphasized the people around the technology. Strategists, compliance specialists, creative staff and communicators belonged in the same operation. He also described Project Catalyst, an innovation platform based on experimentation and iteration. The founder was still concerned with how the organization would develop its next tools.
An introduction in Ireland
There is another scene in this career, far from a database demonstration. In September 2017, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar addressed a Washington Ireland Program conference. Near the beginning, he welcomed McConnon back to Ireland and wished him well as the program’s chair. It was a public acknowledgment of a role beyond DDC.
Varadkar had his own reason to understand the institution. He had participated in the program in 2000, spending a summer in Washington as an intern in Congressman Jack Quinn’s office. Seventeen years later, he was addressing its participants as Ireland’s head of government. The distance between those two visits gave the occasion its significance.
McConnon’s chairmanship connected him to a program bringing emerging leaders from Ireland and Northern Ireland into professional placements and leadership development. The work depended on a different kind of introduction: giving young people access to offices, conversations and experiences that might otherwise remain remote. Here, relationships were part of an educational opportunity.
His involvement had begun before that conference. He joined the program’s board in 2010. He remained chair until 2021, when Susan Hoffman succeeded him. Her appointment announcement thanked him for his work and commitment. His publicly listed volunteer history also includes the program’s Leadership Council.
The program adds an international dimension to a career rooted in Washington. Its participants arrive with their own perspectives on public life, then spend time inside American institutions. McConnon’s role was in helping sustain that exchange. The setting also complicates the familiar picture of public affairs as a business conducted solely among established insiders. Students enter the story as people learning how institutions work, with careers of their own still ahead of them.
It would be too convenient to turn every nonprofit role into a lesson in company management. The connection is more concrete. These activities required McConnon to spend time supporting institutions outside his own business. They put his professional network and organizing experience in settings where the intended beneficiaries were students and families.
“But political and policy battles come and go.”
B.R. McConnon III, reflecting on the tournament in 2021
What remains on the calendar
In September 2022, DDC announced that Michael Fleischer would become CEO and that McConnon would depart at the end of the month. Fleischer had joined in August. The handover closed a leadership chapter that stretched from DDC’s founding through its acquisition and years inside Omnicom. Twenty-six years is a substantial portion of a working life.
The date matters when describing him now. Founder and former chairman and CEO explain his relationship to DDC. His subsequent public affiliations include nonprofit governance and another business role: No Greater Sacrifice lists him as a director and principal at Prospect Street PA. The Public Affairs Council’s leadership roster lists him with Prospect Street Partners.
The tournament continued to appear on his calendar after the DDC transition. No Greater Sacrifice named him among the event chairs for its July 2024 Invitational at Erin Hills in Wisconsin. Its 2025 flier again included his name among the chairs, this time for an October event at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia.
Those listings establish continuity without requiring a dramatic reinvention story. His association with the fundraiser outlasted the executive title. So did his connection to the organization’s educational purpose. A returning event needs the unremarkable work of chairs, sponsors and organizers, year after year, long after the first bright idea has stopped being new.
The distinction between an idea and an institution is especially visible in fundraising. An idea can arrive on a beach. An institution requires another date, another invitation and people willing to take responsibility for both. McConnon’s professional life offers examples of each stage, from a small database company to an event with a recurring place in Washington’s social calendar.
When he reflected on the tournament in 2021, his ambition for it reached beyond that year’s business. He wanted the gathering to continue, to bring political opponents together and to support service members’ families. It was a personal aspiration attached to something other people could keep using.
The appeal of the story lies in its scale. There are corporate transactions and public titles, but also computers that needed testing, students who needed introductions and golfers who needed an invitation. McConnon’s career moved among those details. Washington has plenty of arguments to attend to. He has spent a considerable part of his working life arranging ways for people to attend.