This city is no stranger to the fine art of lobbying — Washingtonians know how to schmooze — but one young local startup says the advocacy practices D.C. has known for years are starting to change.
"The old model of how audiences are activated, the kind of old age of the steakhouse dinner is ending," said Crowdskout Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer Lucy Caldwell. "We see now that it's not enough to just take a member of Congress out to [dinner], you really need to show value in terms of how you're reaching out to constituents... it's a really awesome thing for democracy, but there's a lot of effort now to upend the old model of lobbying and issue-moving."
The original idea was to build a digital tracking platform for publishers and media organizations. Co-founder and CEO Zack Christenson was a journalist in the District when he noticed space for one-stop shop data management software.
"It quickly snowballed into a platform built for advocacy, combining your online and offline data and getting a 360-degree view on anybody in your audience, and then being able to engage with them," he said. "As we went along, we built it for political campaigns, for advocacy groups, trade associations, things like that, all located right here in the D.C. area."
Crowdskout quietly launched in September 2014 after a $1.3 million seed round. They closed a second seed round in January 2016, raising $4.3 million total. They're growing slowly and steadily, Christenson said, but 2017 is bringing more of a boom. They added about a dozen people to the team in 2017 so far, including D.C. tech titan Shana Glenzer, and the 27-person company expects to bring on about a dozen more before the year ends.
They won't disclose client information, but Christenson said Crowdskout works with "some of the largest political and trade associations in D.C. right now."
Most of these organizations tend to keep their data stored on spreadsheets, many of which aren't universal within a company, he said. So, those working in a canvassing department, for example, may not necessarily have access to the same information as someone on the financial team.
"In any given organization right now, you have a director of fundraising, you have a political department, there might be five or six pieces of a company and they all have their own data sets," he said. "So, it's scattered all over the place."
Crowdskout believes that by organizing all of a company's data into one place, they are streamlining traditional lobbying and advocacy practices in D.C. Instead of relying solely on voter data or other metrics, organizations — or really, anyone trying to move an issue, Christenson said — can generate and analyze every bit of data they can get their hands on to engage with their audiences strategically.
Customers sign up for annual contracts or monthly recurring subscriptions, and can connect any number of services or third party apps to the platform, granting anyone at the company access to the same data.
The amount they input into the system determines the cost of service. A national organization with data from around the country, for example, would pay more than a small trade association working only in a couple cities.
Crowdskout plans to roll out around five new software capabilities in the next six-to-seven months, expanding the package of options they offer their clients. But when asked where they see themselves in five or ten years, the answer, they joked, is "I don't know."
"I hope that we're big and huge," Christenson said, but for now, he added, they're focused on the immediate future.
"We want people to amplify their voices, we want people to get organized, we want people to tell their elected officials what they think," he said. "So, we're building a platform for anybody to be able to do that. [We want to] build software that empowers people to do that."
Image courtesy of Crowdskout
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the amount raised in funding. $1.3 million was raised in September 2014. The article has been updated to reflect these changes.
