I’m so excited to announce @anotheracronym has acquired Groundbase, the best CRM + SMS tool on the political market, along with their incredible team led by @gjniemira + are launching Shadow, a new tech company to build smarter infrastructure for campaigns anotheracronym.org/introducing-sh…
At ACRONYM, we talk a lot about building infrastructure that is nimble and can evolve over time to help Democrats run smarter campaigns and build political power. When it comes to technology, this continues to be a huge challenge + gap within the progressive landscape.
After the 2016 election, there was a huge influx of new tools and tech for campaigns to use, but there was little attention or resources paid to how these tools would be integrated into campaigns and adopted by organizers to really move the needle.
Investors, founders + stakeholders building and advocating for these new tools often present them as “silver bullets” to win campaigns, when anyone who has ever worked as an organizer knows that any tool is only as good as how you use it + how it integrates w/ everything else.
There is no silver bullet. Worse, many political tech companies are driven by the wrong incentives - profit over impact, which leads them to focus on rapid growth over deep adoption, setting them up for failures in the boom+bust political market. See here: techcrunch.com/2019/01/14/hus…
With Shadow, we’re building a new model incentivized by adoption over growth, with a deep focus on building the underlying tech infrastructure that will enable campaigns to use the most effective new tools in smarter ways & better integrate + leverage data across platforms.
For example, imagine a system that automatically syncs data between a volunteer management platform & SMS tool, and then moves the data to where it needs to go when it needs to go there, saving campaign organizers hours of manual data entry & reducing risk of mistakes.
Imagine how much more effective campaigns would be if they knew not only whether a voter’s door was knocked and when, but whether and when that same voter received a text about an upcoming campaign event, and if they had yet been served a digital ad about that event on Facebook.
It might be hard to believe but campaigns cannot look at their voter contact efforts in this way - in one place, and in a way that enables them to make smarter decisions in real time about how they allocate their limited resources to win.
If we want to build real political power, we need to fix this problem and at Shadow, we've got a plan, the talent and the resources to make it happen. So I'm pretty stoked. If you want to learn more about Shadow's roadmap + team, DM me or @gjniemira - we'd LOVE to nerd out w/ you
