Tools for Amplifying Civic Engagement with Emma Bloomberg of Murmuration

what we're seeing happen at a national level does not make it impossible for there to be changed at a local level. And I think what we're increasingly seeing is that people in communities across this country are having to take all the more responsibility for improving outcomes. And there's a real opportunity to do that. Hello, this is the Great Battlefield Podcast. I'm Nathaniel G. Perlman. A great political battle is being fought right now between progressives and the forces of reaction on the other side. This show is about the political entrepreneurs and other progressive leaders who are finding new or improved ways to fight. My guest today is Emma Bloomberg. Emma is the founder and CEO of Mermeration, a nonprofit organization that works to improve local organizing by providing a software, data, and analytics platform and other services. Since my last interview in Emma's world, Mermeration has absorbed its for-profit software experiment, then called Helm, brought it into Mermeration and released the package as organizer by Mermeration and is now working to scale its impact and user base. I enjoyed hearing from Emma about growing up in a prominent family, her entry into politics through her father's first mayoral campaign and administration, her time at the Robin Hood Foundation, an anti-poverty nonprofit, and her decade-long efforts in the community organizing space. I also asked about how her toolset fits into the political tech space and what she's thinking about in this challenging political moment for our country. It's a good episode you should listen. So, after a quick word from our sponsor, my interview with Emma Bloomberg at Mermeration. Look out Facebook. Now you can try website visits directly from CivicShout, introducing Express CPC, CivicShout's new cost per click ad system. Everyone already knows that CivicShout's the best way to grow your opt-in email list. Folks like M&R, Greenpeace, and Feeding America stand by it, Clarify Agency saw a 200% return on ad spend in just two months. Grow your list and run traffic campaigns that hit so hard your team will wonder how you did it. CivicShout, the ad platform for progressive causes, head to civicshout.com/partners to learn more. So, Emma, would you mind introducing yourself and giving me a quick biography? Certainly, I'm a Bloomberg, I'm the CEO and founder of Mermeration. You said quick biography, so I guess the question is how far back you actually want me to go, but I usually ask people to talk about their youth and their family, and since you have a notable family, that would make sense to include that. Sure, sure. All right, verbosity is not something I'm typically known for, at least outside of the written word, but yes, happy to go back. I was raised, born and raised in the city of New York. Civic engagement was something that was always core to my family life. I have lots of vivid memories of going with my father to vote back in the day when he had to flip all the switches and then pull a big lever over and stand behind that little curtain. And we were also engaged in what did our community need, what did it look like to support the organizations that were trying to make our community better? So it was something that was just a given. You could not just live your life. You had to think about what you were doing to make the world around you or certainly the neighborhood around you a better place. I went to Princeton undergrad, I studied medieval literature. As one does. We're useful life skills. Now what I truly loved about it was when you're reading any text, the context matters as much as the words that are on the page. Words can mean any number of different things when you get back into medieval English. And it was just fun to have everything I was reading be a puzzle and trying to think about what were they trying to say, not just what do I think they said? You know, my dad was a professor of English literature. And so he studied early English and Anglo-Saxon and you know, like the kinds of things that you did back in the late 50s to ground yourself. And I think all of that led to quite a lot of wisdom about the world. And I don't think there's regrets in kind of a liberal arts education. No, I don't know what it says about me that you just said that's the kind of thing you did in the 1950s and I did it in the in the late 90s, but sure. Well, I think they're still doing it today and I honor this. Yeah. But so the past that I was on was go get a master's degree in medieval literature, come back and maybe get a PhD, maybe teach, maybe write, that was what I thought I was going to do. But at my college graduation, my father announced his candidacy for mayor. That certainly changed his life. I think it changed the lives of many many New Yorkers, but it absolutely set me on a different trajectory. There was this opportunity that I couldn't pass up to actually go and support a candidate who I truly believed in and to learn everything I could about what it looks like to work on campaigns, what it looks like to spread a message of what a future could look like. That totally changed my life. So because I was the English major, I wrote and edited all of our direct mail. I got to learn everything that we knew back then about micro targeting to think about all the different versions of every about Mike piece that I could write who needed to hear what and what would get people interested in learning more, what would get people to think about turning out, think about volunteering and similar. And lots of people say that there were only two people on that campaign who believed that he had a shot, the candidate himself and me, but we were right, it turns out. And so once we got through the election and he was actually the mayor, I had to decide am I am I really going back to school? Am I going back to medieval literature or should I now take this opportunity to think about how to make the city I've lived in my whole life a better place. So I wanted to see the government after that. So I want to ask you about your relationship with your dad because everybody that grows up in any family of strong-minded people, accomplished people has to figure out their own path. And for a lot of kids, I think for mine so far, it would be unlikely that they would want to be that close in the beginning of their careers to me, although maybe if I were running for mayor, maybe a project like that might draw them in, but in general they want to do their own thing. How was he as a parent and how did you connect enough to want to pursue that close to them? So I've known my whole life that I would never work for his company, right? He has a strict known epitome policy. He was always very clear. This is what I'm doing. You, Emma, should figure out who you are, what you want to do, and anything I can do to help you do that great, but otherwise you're on your own, right? So this was not about necessarily being close to him or following in his footsteps. This was like for me very much about the city that I care deeply about and the opportunity to learn an incredible amount about how campaigns are run and how government works. I didn't ever report directly to him. Once I got into city government, referred to him as the mayor, unless we were at home or that sort of thing, but people say, "Oh, was that just sort of pretence?" But no, I was a junior staffer and I had a boss and my boss had a boss and my boss's boss had a boss and that was sort of how that worked. I always felt just incredibly lucky. One thing I have never done is work on a campaign where I didn't truly, deeply at my core believe that my candidate was the best candidate. Part of that is because I've worked on my father's campaigns and the word hero gets thrown around a lot. He is certainly a role model for me in every way. He has committed himself to his family, to his community, to now the world, right? If a little bit of that rubs off on me, great, but I'm also able to do that in my own way, right? I don't hear him out talking about at this moment in time, the importance of deep community engagement or grassroots organizing, right? That's the path that I have chosen, but I think that the way I got here was very much informed by the lessons that I learned from him and by the opportunity that I had to follow in his footsteps, even if I was quite a few steps behind. If you and he were the only ones, theoretically, who believed that he would win, why do you think he won? So many people have different opinions about that. There were any number of things that had to happen to make it possible. I think 9/11 was a huge shift for our city, right? That was primary day. I have no idea what the outcome of the election would have been had that not happen, but I do think that that caused a reset in people's thinking on, you know, what do we really need in this moment? Giuliani was incredibly popular as a result and he endorsed my father, so that certainly helped. And fundamentally, I think it was just a moment in time where competence seemed to be attractive to people. Even if he didn't have the political experience, he'd certainly proven that he could manage. And I think he'd proven that he could attract and higher, great people and what the city needed was someone who was going to be able to bring us all together and someone who was going to be able to chart a path forward. I think there was a lot of fear that that was the end of the city. And in fact, it was the beginning of a great new era for us. So you could dig into it to lots of different data points and come up with any number of theories as to why, but as I was living it in real time, that felt very, very real. Yeah, makes sense. So tell me about working for city government. What did you exactly sound like you were not at the top of the totem pole? No, I was not at the top of the totem pole. I got I loved working for the city. I was there for three years. My first year was the greatest learning experience of all time. I was tasked with setting us up to be able to launch 311, the call center for all city services. And my job was to go to every single city agency office of the mayor government office. However, you wanted to find everyone who took phone calls of any kind, find out why they took phone calls, what they tried to do through those phone calls, and document all of it so that we could make sure the 311 covered it. So I basically just spent a year learning everything there was to know about how people interact with city government. When that was done, I spent the next two years on solid waste management. I worked in the mayor's office, but with the sanitation department on long-term planning for how the city was going to handle trash for the next 20 years. And that was about economic development and environmental justice. I got to spend time in lots of different communities all across the city to see how they were impacted by trucks to think about what the opportunities were from an environmental standpoint. It was a really truly sort of there were public private partnership parts to it. There were unions, there were civil servants, there was business, it was it was an incredible learning experience. And it caused me to again rethink what path I was on, what did I really want to do. And that was when I went on to grad school after that because I realized as much as I had maybe thought someday I would go back into academia, I was definitely more of a doer. A city like New York is just staggeringly complex. And the fact that it works at all, that it moves garbage out and food in and people around and it boggles the mind. I don't even know how you think about taking on the task of being a mayor of a city like that. The president is even bigger, but you don't kind of deal with the nitty gritty people know they're mayor. Mayor is a different kind of connectedness to a community than lots of other jobs. For sure. This may sound silly to some, but one of the things that I really love is when you walk down the street, when a construction project is starting and there's a big hole and you can sort of look down and you see all the different layers of infrastructure that have been built over the years. You should have get these just how complex, even just the web of services under the pavement is. So yes, 100%. I've seen images from GIS's that have every point in the city mapped to a very high precision and just the complexity there. I have a friend who has spent her career just dealing with subway entrances and exits and there's billions of dollars in. Yeah. Yeah. So if you are interested in operations, there are an infinite number of projects you could take on at a city like New York. So you decided it seems from your LinkedIn to do a joint MBA, MPA at Harvard. That's a lot of quantitative stuff as well as policy and so on as well as I guess business principles. How did you take to that? Did you find that to be a useful set of years that you spent doing that? I would say yes and no. When I was going into it, my thought process was some of the most interesting and most effective tables that I had been at in the prior three years involved people from all different sectors. Right. There were non-profit leaders, there were government leaders, there were business leaders. And so to try to truly understand all those different sectors or at least have some experience in them. I felt like going to both the Kennedy School government and Harvard Business School would start to give me that kind of exposure and help me with that sort of more comprehensive thinking. I think grad school is what you make of it. I think I was a little itchy to get back to work. I certainly enjoyed my time. I had some really truly great professors. I don't really go back that often. I'm not sort of deeply involved in the alumni network. I had a purpose I was trying to get through and I got through it and came back to New York. Did the background in medieval studies help or was it a struggle to do some of that quantitative stuff? Or were you strong in that anyway? I had the benefit of a great K-12 education. I did my fair share of math and science. I think I ended up in the English department because at the time, I'm really dating myself at this point, but it wasn't totally clear to me that women did anything else, sort of English, history or polypsi and I liked English. If I were going back to school now, I might have studied something slightly more quantitative. But no, I think it's important, I mean, certainly to then be able to go on and found something like murmuration to be able to build out our first round of budgets and forecasts and think about how we were going to become an organization that could be sustainable over time. I was very grateful to have had that experience. And then right after grad school, I spent seven years at the Robin Hood Foundation doing strategic planning for our nonprofit partners and I needed to be able to think about sort of all of the aspects of what it takes to run a successful organization. So certainly, the ability to get a little bit more under the hood on how businesses are run through the business school was really helpful in that. I have a little exposure to Robin Hood. Well, it's an anti-poverty nonprofit and it uses analytics to try to figure out where you get the most bang for your buck. I've seen a presentation by whoever the chief economist was there about the methodology and I've read the book that Robin Hood has out on that a number of years ago. As you're now out of Robin Hood and you had six years there, what's your view on how well they do what they do and just generally on your time there? Yeah, look, at the time that I started Robin Hood was really the only philanthropic organization out there that was using something resembling a benefit cost ratio for how they were doing grants. So they changed the field. Certainly, I think, for the better and have influenced any number of other philanthropic organizations as a result. Back then, it was novel. And now, it's not so much. Every funder has some sense of how they're thinking about what the ROI is on their investment. I haven't worked there in the last 10 years. I stay in touch with the number of board members and number of staffers. They're executive director. There's a lot of people there that I worked with still or that I knew from prior lives. And I think their unique focus, singular focus on poverty in New York City is incredibly important for anyone who is trying to have an impact in New York and doesn't have the time or the expertise to go and find of the hundreds, if not thousands of nonprofit organizations, that there are, you know, who's doing the best work in what community to have an organization like Robin Hood out there doing that due diligence, staying in touch with those organizations, providing them with management assistance, helping them to grow their impact and similar. It's an invaluable service to anyone else who wants to get involved. I'm really proud of the time that I had there. Why is that not a government function? Why is that a nonprofit sector function, the poverty problem? When the government has orders of magnitude more resources, it is not dependent on the fickleness of donors. Well, it's dependent on other kinds of fickleness for sure. But how do you think about that? Yeah, to me, philanthropy is incredibly important, but it's not sufficient. So one of the things that I loved doing at Robin Hood was investing in programs that I thought of as research and development for government. We did a lot of partnerships with the city of New York and the sort of ethos around them was let us test this out with philanthropic dollars if it works, you can scale it. I think that that is a great leverage point for philanthropy. Be a little more nimble, try things in a smaller scale, and then hand them off to government if they actually work. The problem of poverty in New York is absolutely a government problem. I think one of the reasons that I ended up leaving Robin Hood and going out on my own to start murmuration was, again, this perception that I have that I think others share, which is at the heart of your question, which is that in the end, all the scale is that government. And the reason that the systems that are failing people all across the city of New York and, for example, are government systems for the most part. Where philanthropy comes in is to say, okay, here are the people who have been failed today and need help. But if you just focus on helping them today and then tomorrow and then the day after, there's always going to be the next day when people are going to need help again. So you sort of have to do both. What can we do for people who are in crisis today and what can government do to change systems so that there aren't as many people in crisis tomorrow? What's the founding story for murmuration? I guess fourish years into my time at Robin Hood. I started to get a little bit frustrated with exactly what sort of you were just raising, Thank you very much. the scale difference between what philanthropy can handle and what what role government has to play. And so I started spending more time on nights and weekends with organizations that were trying to influence public policy in particular with organizations that were trying to help communities be part of shaping the outcomes. And one of the things that I saw pretty immediately was that these community-based organizations were lacking access to great tools and data. In many cases, they were small, they were underfunded, they were nonpartisan, they didn't fit neatly into any bucket that would allow them access to the kinds of tools and data that frankly, you know, we've had on my father's three campaigns, right? It seemed to me that if we were actually going to move the needle on changing systems, these organizations should be able to punch above their weight. Anytime you're trying to fight inertia, right? You need to really be able to push hard. And so to give community-based organizations every advantage to have their voices heard and to help to change those kinds of systems seemed to me to be something that someone should be focused on. I say someone because it did take me a couple of years to decide that it was going to be me. I have a dear friend and colleague who runs an organization that partners with Marmaration now, who at one point said, "Emma, this is the last time we're having this conversation. Either you're going to quit your job and go start this thing or we're going to just have other kinds of conversations at lunch." And that was the sort of push that I needed to say, "Okay, you're right." Rather than continuing to complain about the fact that a data and tools ecosystem doesn't exist for nonpartisan community-based organizations, let me go out and see if maybe I could do that. And out of curiosity, could you share the partner organization and person that helped you with that push? Yeah, of course. His name is Mike Booman. He runs an organization called Lee. They support people running for a local office. It's mostly talent development. Many of the people they work with, they work with for two, three, four, even five years on what their journey will be. But the end goal is to get them to do things like run for school board, town council, mayor, and similar. It's amazing how a particular conversation can have so much impact on your trajectory in your life. And over and over when I talk to people, stay, identify these conversations. They probably couldn't have even known at the time. But when you look back, something like that happened and you've been 10 years or so doing this thing, tell me about what it took to get it going. No matter what the organization is, it's generally not an easy thing to create something out of nothing. No. So the first thing I did was quit my job and then spend the next six months meeting with anyone and everyone who would meet with me to try to confirm that my hypothesis was actually valid. The last thing I wanted to do was go start an organization that was going to provide access to tools and data to community-based organizations and find out no one actually wanted to use them. And I was really lucky. There was a young woman named Lily Haskins who was working at the New York City Department of Education at the time and was looking for what was next. And you'd have to ask her, but for some reason she believed enough in me to say, "All right, I'll take a leap of faith too and I will come and help you figure out if we can really launch this." Something about having another person to sit next to travel with, to debrief meetings with, and that sort of thing, it was beyond valuable. I'm eternally grateful to her for that. What did she bring, what was her expertise or position at the Department of Education? She was in her early 20s at the time. I mean, it was one of her, you know, maybe her first job out of college. And what she brought was hunger, passion, and frankly, she's just one of those people who never drops a ball. We'd have seven meetings and whatever follow-up needed to happen. I knew someone Lily would tell me to make sure that it actually got done or would do it herself. What a great job for her too. It strikes me like, "Tah, and I've seen this happen to a number of people that if you get involved early in a startup sort of situation like this, and you get that one-in-one relationship to someone who's trying to found it, and you've trusted her. She was a responsible person. She was a hardworking person." She seems like it would be a great thing for both of you to have that to work off each other. It certainly was. And for those first couple of years, between the two of us, we did everything. So I think it was an incredible learning experience for both of us. But as we started to bring on partners, all of a sudden, I was like, "Well, I guess we need someone to run partnerships." I guess you do that, because I'm out here fundraising. It was all of the different pieces of the puzzle that between us, we would have to divide up. The team grew. We were probably eight people by the end of 18 months, two years, something like that, all sitting around one table. But you're absolutely right. Having that first person who was willing to take that leap of faith and help me figure it out was invaluable. You mentioned fundraising. I can't help but be curious about the father who owns a sizeable business and family resources like that. Why are you fundraising? How are you thinking about that? What's the relationship between murmuration and family resources? How did you construct that? I was incredibly lucky that philanthropy is something that he cares about and that I was able to convince him and his team that there was maybe some value for some of their grantees and what we were trying to build. They were our initial investors. The ability to say, "All right, our first year is paid for. Let's go figure this out." It's just a luxury that most founders don't have. I will never stop being grateful for that freedom to really test what worked and to explore and to not be pulled in a million directions was just such a gift. Sometimes when you have that, it can undermine the intensity of the process of the need to survive. I know that happened to me because I did modestly well with my first company and then I started another one which I was able to fund, the small thing. I didn't feel the same pressure that I felt the first time when I knew that I would eat or not eat depending on how hard I worked. How did that work out for you? I am sure that there were moments where that additional pressure would have been immensely valuable. I'm sure there are mistakes that I made along the way that maybe I would have thought instead of just thinking twice about it, I would have thought three times about it. I made them anyway. Because I think we were trying to do something pretty unique and I think that in the end the benefit and that flexibility to be able to test a bunch of things really just outweighed any negative on that front. But look, that was wonderful and I'm very grateful that they continue, the Boomer-Flandtree is continues to fund us because they continue to believe in our work. But for what we're trying to achieve for the scale that we're trying to reach for the number of organizations we want to serve across myriad issues and communities across the country, no one funder can or should do that. And I think from our perspective it is really important that we have a broad coalition of philanthropic investors who believe in what we're trying to do, who can help to make their own portfolios of grantees aware that we exist and who can push and ask questions and help us be better because I think the risk of being entirely self-funded forever of course would be that you're just in your own bubble drinking your own cool aid and no one ever tells you that maybe you should be thinking about doing something a little bit differently. So how was the fundraising to find these philanthropic partners? Was that a slog? Did it come easy? I spent a lot of time fundraising. I am incredibly grateful for our existing funder base and I'm constantly looking to grow it. I think a lot of funders have a question that you asked which is why do you need me if your father is who your father is. And my hope is again that the answer that we have to be more broadly sustainable and we have to be thinking about any number of different paths towards impact and only with a broader funding base. Can we do that? My hope is that resonates and then also what resonates is that our partners really like us and want to continue working with us are asking for more services are asking for us to continue to develop the tools and data and so that demand. I mean one of the things I often hear from a new funder when they first come in with that first investment. No matter how long I've been talking to them is what put them over the edge was an organization they fund said they need us to do their work. And so that is incredibly gratifying one because a whole reason we do this work is so that partner organizations can be more efficient and effective but is also I'll never be able to sell what we do as well as the organizations that use us can. So yeah. That makes sense. When you talk about these partner organizations and you talked also about like the first six months spending a lot of time interviewing them. What were they saying they needed? Or what were you presenting them with your idea of what could help them? What were you trying to build? What's the core idea there? - In the early days, the vast majority of the work that I did at Robinhood was in the public K-12 space. And across the country, you had advocacy organizations, grassroots organizations, mobilizing parents, trying to demand better from their public K-12 systems, but who were blocked from access to tools and data to run those grassroots campaigns. And they were blocked because they were nonpartisan, and in some cases they were working in red states, they were working in blue cities and red states, these were families and community-based organizations all across the country who didn't meet a litmus test for partisanship on either side, and who were underfunded. And so certainly weren't in a position to say, oh, okay, I'm gonna go buy access to a civic engagement CRM, and then I'm gonna get access to a voter file and hire a data manager to clean it up and think about building some models, and that was just not on the table for them. So the initial problem that we set out to solve was for that cohort of organizations, doing the grassroots work around public K-12 education, could we give them access to a civic engagement CRM, voter file data tuned to local context, and really enable them to do more with less, to be more effective at their work. We quickly learned one, access to tools and data isn't enough. You have to also provide the supports to be able to use them. And so we built out a team not on strategic consulting, but on helping to implement strategy in tools and data, and helping grassroots organizations really think about their work a little bit differently, and then research more broadly, right? What does it look like to really be trying to help with targeting at a local level? What does it look like to help grassroots organizations better understand the context in which they're working and similar? And what we've learned over time is, it's gonna sound pretty obvious to most people, but people don't actually live in issue silos, it turns out, so you can come to the table around public K-12, but if you're doing grassroots organizing, you have to be able to meet people where they are, and talk about the issues that are really affecting them in any given moment. So we took a step back, looked at our tools and data, and realized, yeah, sure, we built a couple of model scores that were education-specific, but for the most part, what we built was a civic CRM and data asset that were designed around local community organizing, really regardless of issue. That's been how we've broadened our base, and why we now think there's the potential for us to really help to shape communities all across the country, or rather help communities shape themselves more effectively, leveraging everything we've built over the last 10 years. - My understanding from interviews that I've had with Brian Rich and Lucy, who was at Crowd Scout and some folks at Tuesday company and others, is that you started to acquire, organizer also started to acquire some pieces. How far did you get along before you decided that was gonna be a way to solve this problem? - So in the early days, we sat down, I think at the time that we're eight of us on staff and with our board, and came to the decision that we were never going to build our own technology. That was not gonna be the best use of the money we were raising. It was expensive, we would undoubtedly build it wrong and have to rebuild it. That was not where our expertise lay. What we were going to do was curate access to the best political tech out there, to the best data out there, and help organizations use it. What I didn't know at the time was how truly fraught the ecosystem for political tech is, and how unfortunately, because all politics is cyclical, political tech doesn't have a great track record of lasting for quite as long as we were hoping it would. And so we did not have a proactive acquisition strategy. CrowdsCount was our partner, organizer was our partner. We were, for both of those companies, we were their largest clients, and we had great relationships with both of them, and really appreciated the ability to rely on their engineering teams to be able to go to them and say these are the kinds of features that the organizations we work with need and to sort of code develop. But unfortunately, market realities hit both, and when then faced with either losing access to the CRM and the great-cambusing tool that was organizer, or acquiring the IP and figuring out how to cobble it together, we acquired the IP and cobbled it together. And that really changed the, I mean, we were a team of 30, and now we're a team of 120, right? We had to bring all of that engineering capacity in house, all of that product capacity in house. What it did allow us to do is two things. One, to really lean into development designed around the organizations we work with, right? Not having to think about that broader set of clients, but really just thinking about what do local community-based works need. And to say, all right, we're gonna really ramp up our fundraising from philanthropy and try to think about how to smooth out that cycle, so that you're not dealing with, we've got lots of clients for six months every two years, but you're actually able to think about the day-in-day out work that is community-organizing and match the resources to the effort and smooth that cycle. So that's how we ended up with those two, and then Tuesday Company came in, sort of about a year or two later, as we were starting to take the legacy tech that we had and say, okay, this works now, but in the end, for scale, we're gonna have to build something new. And we've combined all of that into our organizer platform. And so, organizer by Marmaration, which officially launched at the end of last year, and now all of our partners use is our civic engagement CRM, and it runs on our Atlas data set, which takes data from multiple voter files, census data, consumer data, lots of infutations from our data science team, all the models that we build, and is really focused on putting what we think of as the best nonpartisan local data into the hands of community organizers across the country. - When you were sitting around with eight people and resolving not to get into the political tech business, but then failed in that result. - There we are, yes. What was your experience like? I have some sense that it wasn't linear in putting together that platform that you recently launched that you mentioned. Can you tell me about what it was like to try to pull disparate pieces of technology together to try to induce the teams from some of these organizations to work for you, to work together, to provide leadership to them? Like, what's the experience been now as a tech entrepreneur? - Yeah, not where I thought I was gonna be when I was graduating with that degree in Medieval Literature. Look, I think one of the greatest lessons that I learned from my father was, if you don't know the answer, hire someone smarter than you who does, and then trust that they're gonna do the right thing. Well, I've watched him do that his whole life. That was certainly how he built city government. I am not an engineer. I have never built a product myself. My background is at this point mainly in strategy, and I think that we have a really compelling mission. And what's been incredibly gratifying over the years is how little sort of selling I've had to do to get people to want to work here. We are really trying to accelerate opportunity for people all across the country and help people use the power that they already have, but actually have their voices be elevated. It's just, that's really never been a problem. Sure, there's always uncertainty when you're bringing in people from different cultures and trying to unify one organization with from lots of disparate pieces. We have retained a number of people from each of those organizations and the ones that we've lost along the way and one of the great joys of running organization is watching people move on to their dream job. And so I am always happy for them when that happens. But I like to think that we've got a strong alumni network of people who care about our future and who think that we are taking all the best of what they were able to help to build and make it even better. - What's the story with the helm idea? So I had talked to Evan Burfield who had recounted sitting next to you at dinner and talking about your alignment on some of this stuff. And then he came in to help try to build this platform which was gonna be called helm at one point. What was his role in this and how did that, why did that come to an end? - That was one of those, I think we all have those moments in life where you're randomly seated next to someone a conversation starts and it turns out that it has a major impact on your life and your career trajectory. We were seated next to each other and we just hit it off. and had so much of a shared values. I don't know, vision for what we were trying to do, that it seemed like we should maybe try to figure out how to work together. I think for me not having the background of having run a tech company, right, I mean, at the time, our relation was still very much just in the services business. We hadn't yet really brought any of that tech in-house. The timing was such that we had sort of just then acquired the IP around CrowdsGout and Organizer. He had that kind of a background. And so it was incredibly helpful to me that he was willing to come in, be my partner, help to pull those entities together and think about what it would look like to, one, how could we keep that legacy tech cobbled together for long enough that our partners could continue to do their work and to what would it look like to rebuild from the ground up, what is now Organizer by Marmaration and really be able to achieve greater scale. So that was the idea behind Helm. It was a holiom subsidiary of Marmaration and it was let's allow the Marmaration team to continue to support grassroots organizers in the platform while someone else is focused on a day-to-day basis on building the platform. I think we were also experimenting with whether or not there was a for-profit angle that we could take advantage of, right, that would ultimately bring more revenue in and help us to continue to grow the impact. And one of the things that Evan and I found, I think if you were on here with me, he would agree with this, is it is really hard to both chase profit and impact, right? The vast majority of the organizations that we want to work with cannot afford to pay us anything like what it costs to develop the tech. We charge them for access to the data, we charge them for additional services that they want, but in terms of what the actual just hard-cost investments are of building and maintaining something like organizer, those kinds of organizations can't afford to pay that. And the features that organizations that can afford to pay need are not necessarily aligned with what community-based organizations need. And so we were constantly facing this tension of, here's the list of feature requests from community-based organizations, here's the list of feature requests from organizations who can afford to pay us to develop them. What are we going to prioritize and how is this going to work? And in the end, impact was what was most important to us. We believed that the philanthropic money was out there to make that possible. And so we decided to shut down Helm, unify it into Marmaration, pull all the tech and the team into the nonprofit and focus solely on the features that are necessary for driving deeper community engagement. Was that a hard call? Did that feel like a disappointment or did it feel like a relief? How did that feel to you? Yeah, it was certainly a hard call. I don't know that it was a disappointment or a relief so much as it was clarifying. I think both Evan and I felt like we, and we were actually, we're being pulled in lots of different directions. And to just be able to say, hold on, the reason we were trying to do this in the first place is impact. Let's take a step back and figure out what's the right path forward for that. It maybe relief is the right word, but mostly it was just clarifying. And I think it was helpful for staff too. I mean, I think if you spoke to anyone who is still on the team from that time having that clarity being unified around one mission, one vision for the world, I think in the end, it was helpful for everybody. Does you have to shrink down as part of that process? Yeah, we in some areas, yes, in others know, right, like there were places where we had a murmuration, how to data science team, how to data science team. We merged them, is the total data science team the site, you know, the sum of both. It's a little bit smaller. But we did not have, for example, a product or engineering team. At number 18. At number 18. Right. And so there was, there wasn't as much duplication of effort as you might think. We had tried to be really deliberate about not duplicating when we were building out helm. And so, so certainly, you know, there was a little bit of downsizing, but not as significant as you might think. So if a community advocacy organization comes on your platform and works with you now, what are they getting out of that in the now? So first and foremost, they get access to tools and data, right? Organizer is a civic engagement CRM and they can use that for their, their door knocking emails, managing sort of all of the points of communication that you think of having with their, their base, their community. However, they think about the people they talk to, their neighborhood. You get access to Atlas, which is our data asset. Again, combining multiple voter files and then a whole bunch of work that our data science team does to tune that to local context. And you get access to our support team to help you to figure out how to implement your strategy in tools and data. That looks like everything from, I really just need some, some onboarding and some training and then I'm good to go because I'm managing a small community. And this is really just about making sure that I'm staying in touch with them, that they're showing up for my events and that we're continuing to grow our membership base to multi-site, state organizations that are running legislative advocacy campaigns on any number of issues, any number of communities and, and require more from our team in terms of how to implement against those strategies. There are other advocacy software companies. There are other political or nonprofit CRM companies. Others of them are linked to data sets, including voter file. But do you think distinguishes what you're providing from what else is out there? Yeah, I think of us as unique for two primary reasons. One is the fact that we are philanthropically funded. And so can really be focused on what is it that organizations need, not what are the features or data assets that are most likely to be monetizable. And then the second piece is the local focus. The first of what is out there is focused for national, for statewide, for the kinds of sophisticated campaigns and organizations that can afford to pay for that kind of stuff. And we are really trying to think about what do small organizations on the ground need from a feature standpoint and from a data standpoint to be able to be more effective. And that's that I think is pretty unique. I know a guy who's been a guest on my podcast a couple times, Billy Wimzat. You know him, he's got something called the movement voter project. And they work with numerous community organizing entities across the states in the hundreds of them. And they move a lot of money to them. Are those kind of organizations which are kind of in the political advocacy nexus and local, usually fairly small? Where is your client base at this point and where would you want it to be? >> Yeah. We are really just in the last year or so starting to invest in growth in a different way. Part of that was we had to wait until organizer was up and running because our legacy platform couldn't really scale. And so we were just tender in our ability to serve organizations because every organization we added to the system, we were worried it was going to break it for everybody else. So to not have to worry about that is an incredible luxury and allows us to really think about scale in a different way. For us, I don't know if everyone on my team would agree with this, but I am as excited about the single site community based organization that wants to work with us to work in their 10 square block radius. As I am about the multi state, multi site organization, the one real benefit that those large organizations provide for us, one is probably more than one, but the one that comes to mind first is that scale play. So someone like the movement voter project, the movement cooperative, any of these organizations that then go ahead and work with lots of other smaller organizations helps us to scale faster. Because we can work directly with them, make sure they know how to use our tools and data and that they are thinking about all the ways they could be advantageous to community groups across the country. And then they can go and spread that and make it more widely available in ways that we might not be able to just go and sort of door to door. So I think about that as sort of a hub and spoke model. I do love a good hub. Understandable, yes. As I'm certain you're aware, the company that I built got rolled up through a number of private equity moves into something called Bontera. And if the result of a lot of acquisitions of different nonprofit and political campaign tools, its reputation is not as strong as it once was in the democratic political space. And I know that movement cooperative recently put out an RFP for a van replacement. Is that something you guys responded to or should have? We did respond and we are very hopeful that in the end we'll be able to help to help fill that gap. Is that weakness in the van part of Bontera? An opening for you to get into partisan politics? How do you think about like what team you're on, which is often something that you and Evan have avoided being on a team because of where you're located. How are you gonna address that? So first of all, we are a 5-1-c3 organization, so we are nonpartisan in nature. We believe that communities all across the country, whether they are in red states or blue states, should have the right to have their voices heard and should be part of making progress on issues that matter all across the country. We do have very clear community standards and community values. In the end, our vision for America is one in which everyone is free to live a healthy and dignified life. So organizations that are trying to get ahead by putting others down won't cross that threshold for us. We feel very strongly about the kind of country we are trying to see here. And I think to your partisan question, many of the issues that the organizations that we work with are focused on, you might think of as partisan, I just think of them as issues. That makes sense. Again, as a 5-1-c3, I don't know that it would even be viable, but I've never had as a goal that we are a van replacement writ large. It is really important for the Democratic Party to invest heavily in tech and data solutions for the party, certainly at a national level. And my hope would be that Van is able to continue to play a role at that level. Where I think we have seen an opening and and have been stepping into Phil Avoid is at the local level. Right? I think increasingly smaller organizations have found that they are not well served by the broader party ecosystem, even if they are partisan in nature. And so our ability to really focus on what do community-based organizations need, what do organizers need, even though we're coming at it from a nonpartisan perspective, is incredibly helpful even for those organizations that feel strongly about a specific party affiliation. It's impossible to have a conversation right now in this political moment without being aware that the Trump administration is wreaking havoc in many many sectors that are relevant to your clients and your goals. Whether that's in education where you have your roots or in lots of other community needs, how does that fact and the battle against more centralizing of power in the White House under one person affect decision-making in your world? So since our founding, I have always believed in the importance of local. Right? That's why I started the organization if I didn't not sure what I'm doing here. I think that not enough people across the country have been focused on it. And my hope is that now is a moment where there will be a refocusing on the importance of local work to affect change on all the issues that matter. Right? Like the chaos at a national level, the chaos is I suppose my editorializing, maybe not everyone thinks of it as chaos, but what we're seeing happen at a national level does not make it impossible for there to be change at a local level. Regimes around the world that go down the path that we seem to be treading often work to disenpower the civic sector. At some point, they potentially even make it try to make it illegal. And in fact, we're doing that with our cooperation around the world with other countries, civic organizations. There is a local aspect to keeping the life, but there's also a national aspect to changes so large that kind of they can run over potentially local activity. Are you doing any planning about contingencies? Thinking about that? Like do you want to do planning? Well, I don't know that we're too far from some doomsday to be honest. When you talked about your father running on competence and then, you know, I think people felt that he governed with competence. That is not what we have right now. And it goes beyond competence. It goes to nefarious. In my view, you don't have to echo that. But I mean, a community organizing group is a democratic practice. It is a really crucial part of sort of our heritage. We go back to town meetings. We go back to kind of an expectation of government of buy and for the people that can be eroded and has been eroded in lots of countries. So when you think about helping this group, how do you think about that fitting into the history of the moment? One of the things that I worry most about in this country is the erosion of civic engagement broadly. It's sort of the erosion of community and the erosion, therefore, of our democracy. And that makes me all the more committed to the work of local, right? Because I think civic engagement can mean so many things. In any number of rooms I'm in, I say civic engagement of people immediately just think voting. But it is everything that anyone in a neighborhood does day in and day out to make that neighborhood the kind of place they want to live. And I think what we're seeing with younger generation is increased interest in civic participation, not necessarily in voting because of a lack of trust in those systems, but in volunteering, in contributing in whatever ways that they can to building that fabric. And I think as we look at all of the ways that we are increasingly disconnected, anything we can be doing that builds that greater sense of connectivity in communities across this country, helps to bolster what I think of as a participatory democracy, which in the end is our best defense against the kind of thing you're talking about at a national level. I don't have an estimate in my mind of the number of organizations that could use your tools on that kind of long tail of civic engagement, but it's got to be over a million. It's got to be millions. Do you have an estimate and where are you along the way at getting all of them? So I don't know about millions, although you're absolutely right if you think about, if you spend time pounding pavement in communities across this country, there really is sort of a community based organization for every 10 square blocks. There's a biking organization, you name it and they're popping up constantly. We're absolutely right. Now, not all of them need access to tools and data. So there's sort of a subset of that market that I think we can be really useful for. We tend to talk more in the thousands than the millions, but we are early days, right? I mean, again, up until we got organized or launched, scale wasn't something we could really be thinking about. So we currently work with under a hundred and certainly we're adding, actually we're lucky enough to be adding organizations pretty much every week, but not fast enough to get to a million anytime soon. I'm sort of surprised by under a hundred for a decade and I understand the scaling problem with organizer. But in a certain sense, I found that technology, which is built closely with a small number of organizations and the learning is done before you try to do something on mass where you have to do tech support for thousands or more. It's probably a better long term way to grow that expertise, although the expertise has to change over time. But I don't really have a question about that. I think my question is, what are you seeing among those hundred plus organizations and the ones you want to add? What are you seeing in terms of their activity at this point in time? Because there is a feeling in the press that we're kind of dormant, we're not organizing. What's the truth? I don't see that sector as being particularly dormant. The work of organizing is every day kind of work. And if you talk to any of our partner organizations, they are as busy today as they were six months ago, as they will be in six months. I think what they're feeling right now is an increased sense of urgency because more and more of the responsibility for improving outcomes in this country is going to fall to them. So their hope, just as our hope is that more and more people across the country will see that and will be willing to invest alongside them and to join them. My experience from seeing a kind of a suite of products built in an adjacent space is that because of the changes in technology and because of rising expectations among clients and because of entrepreneurship around, there's always more ideas about things that could be done or connections to social media or whatever new platforms are out there. Do you think about more acquisitions of companies that might augment your offerings? on a tech basis or provide the kind of people that would be helpful to scale or how do you think about that? So, one of the things that we talk a lot about in product development is our initial hypothesis was organizations want to one stop shop. They don't want to have to deal with lots of different vendors and so if we can solve all of their problems then we will have really sort of smoothed the path for them to be able to just focus on impact. What we have learned over the years is that we are not necessarily always best positioned to be the ones to build solutions for every need that those organizations have. Where there are great tools out there, we are always happy to build integrations where there are opportunities to allow partners to pull data from one place into another and sort of move it back and forth and operate with different tool sets or different efforts. We are certainly happy to accommodate that. I think we can't be all things for everyone and so we have to really be focused on what do we build well and how do we continue to invest in that and where are there others who are being really innovative and creating exciting new tools and what does it look like to try to find ways to partner there? I have gotten a sense that you provide things beyond tech and data and consulting maybe including research to your partner organizations. What have you got there? We are not a think tank. We don't just do research for research as safe as interesting as that might be. We tend to try to look at what are the questions that our partners are grappling with on a day-to-day basis and how can we help them to answer them sort of collectively. That takes a number of forms. Some of our research is obviously in more data science applications building specific models that help them to talk to segments of the community that are focused on any number of specific issues. Some of that is really big picture, longitudinal research. We've spent the last three years doing some research on Gen Z and how they want to be more civically engaged and what does that look like in large part in response to questions we were getting from our partners on how to more deeply engage with young people. Then we're currently doing something relatively new that we call civic pulse where we're talking to 500 people every day in open-ended questions, what's giving you hope, what's keeping you up at night, what institutions do you trust, what's the role of government, and then using natural language processing to try to distill some themes from that. Really the purpose behind that was we were just getting all kinds of questions from the organizations we work with about what are people actually thinking? What are people actually feeling right now? Polling can only get you so far, but where our hope is with these open ends and with having these kinds of conversations all across America every single day, over time we can start to pull out some insights that will help community-based organizations all across the country have a better sense of what people really are thinking and feeling and what's giving them hope and what needs changing and that that will help those organizations be more effective in their work. Hopefully that will also influence philanthropists to be a little more targeted and the problems that they're trying to solve and can sort of round out the conversation about where is this country going and what's possible in ways that more traditional polling just can't get to. Do you disseminate that to your clients or publicly or who can get a hold of that? So again, as a 5-1-C3 organization, all of our research is available to the public. We posted on our website for Civic Pulse. We are just now launching what we're calling insights by Marmaration where we'll have a sub-stack and we'll try to put out research from Civic Pulse on something more like a weekly basis rather than an annual basis or every six months, which some of our bigger, more comprehensive research takes. But yeah, the goal is to put that research out obviously for our partners to be able to use, but also to help to shape the national conversation. I thought it was interesting that you said you're going to take their research and then run it through national language processing. I assumed to reduce it to summarize it. And I wondered what your opinion would be. I had a guest who instead of using technology that way, they have generated up to 250 personas, which are AI-based entities that they provide them their demographics, their interests. And then they basically conduct a focus group of individually configured machines and then share that information, which is a step more wild and also makes me a step more skeptical. But it is kind of fascinating the way, like, political research market research is adopting some of these new tech. Yeah, look, I think we're all grappling with the fact that traditional polling doesn't work as well as it used to if it, and continues to get harder to do. And then one of the great benefits of where we currently are with AI is rather than having to stick to a script, you can just let people talk. And again, rather than having to manually go through each of those conversations and try to distill the themes, you can leverage something like natural language processing to see where the trends are. So from our perspective, we really are trying to better understand what people across the country are thinking and feeling on a day-to-day basis. Our work is local, the organizations we work with are local, and so it's the local voice that we're trying to ultimately elevate. But I look forward to listening to that episode because I'm fascinated by what that will look like. What else would you want people to know about murmuration at this point that you haven't had a chance to say? I think I've probably said this, but I think in this moment now more than ever, we as a country have to be focused on what does it look like to bolster our participatory democracy and that to me means driving deeper civic engagement. There are organizations all across this country who are doing the really hard work of getting people to understand that their voice matters and to say what they have to say and to help to shape outcomes. And we exist to provide the tools and data to make that work possible. So the more that organizations want to work with us, the better for us because our impact is driven entirely by their impact. Our vision for the world is driven entirely by their hard work. Our goal is just to make them more effective and efficient at it. And for others who are interested in learning more about our work, in co-investing with us, in giving us great ideas for what else we should be doing. I'm here and I'm always happy to talk. Emma, have you thought about running for office yourself? I have not. Why not? You know what it's like? You've seen it from the inside. You can see sometimes how an elected official can really drive a lot of change from a very different vantage point than running a political tech shop or consulting shop. Why not or might you in the future? You never want to say never to anything, but I think the chances are very, very slim. My focus, my whole career has been about enabling others to do great work. I loved being a chief of staff. I loved project management. I love helping others implement against their strategy. The whole ethos behind my admiration is there are organizations out there who are doing incredible work. Can we give them the tools and data they need to be more successful? So again, everything that we're trying to do is help others to have greater impact. That's not the typical resume for someone who goes and actually runs for office. Well, do you love being a CEO? I do love being a CEO. You didn't mention that slight part of your resume, which is the last. That is fair, but again, I think what I love most about being a CEO is the team of people that I have been able to attract. I think about a huge part of my job as doing for them exactly what we as an organization do for our partners, which is setting them up for success, helping them to be able to build the tools, invest in the partnerships and help to drive the impact. So much of that from my perspective is about supporting and enabling others. I don't think that's any different than an enlightened mayor or governor. You do have to actually run for office. That would be tough on me. I'll tell you that. Emma, lovely to talk to you. Anything else you want to say? I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I think more people across this country need to be thinking about how they can support at a local level the great work that is happening day in and day out. If we can do that, we can refocus some of the conversation in this country on what still makes this a great place to be. Hopefully the best to still yet to come. Yeah, I mean, I think some of the best advice I've heard from people about how to be helpful right now is to take care of other people around them in various different ways. And I hope we're doing that. That was Emma Bloomberg. Emma is at murmuration.org. This is Nathaniel G. Pearlman with the Great Battlefield podcast. You can find us at greatbattlefield.com or by searching for great battlefield in places where podcasts are found. The great battlefield is now part of the Democracy Group podcast network. visit democracygroup.org to learn more about other podcasts that cover democracy and civic engagement. You can also help me by leaving comments and good ratings on Apple podcasts or elsewhere and by sending me suggestions for great guests to [email protected].