Polis Politics is a three person startup with a smartphone app that makes canvassing, also known as the process of knocking on people's doors to spread a message or do a survey, much easier. The less than 1-year-old D.C.-based company is currently raising a seed round of investment and plans to make several key hires across sales and engineering in the coming months, heading into a busy campaign season, said co-founder/CEO Kendall Tucker, formerly a campaign manager with the Mara Dolan Massachusetts state senate campaign team.
Polis Politics recently decided to move from Boston, Mass.—where the startup had helped reelect Boston city councilor Michelle Wu and elect first-time candidate Andrea Campbell to the council earlier this year—to Washington to be more closely connected to a larger clientele base. Polis Politics' current clients include campaign teams across state and national races in addition to political communication consultancies, among others.
"Polis ran a closed beta in Massachusetts on seven 2015 campaigns, and all seven won," Tucker told DC Inno, "in a year when overall turnout dropped 34 percent in Massachusetts, our races increased turnout by 10 percent."
One of the biggest challenges that both campaigns teams and contracted political campaign consultants face when it comes to canvassing involves the process of "cutting turfs," which can be best described as the timely and strategic-heavy activity of choosing specific territories to go out and canvass in. These decisions are made based on a variety of factors, including voter demographics, publicly available voting records and other personal information about regional home owners.
Unsurprisingly, canvassing is a rather labor intensive and can be an expensive task because it sometimes involves contracted workers t0 supplement campaign volunteers.
So why do campaign teams canvass then? Canvassing (knocking on people's doors for a vote) seems sort of like an outdated approach to a consistently challenging task anyways, no?
The simple answer is that the results merit the price."Talking to voters face-to-face makes them 20 percent more likely to support a cause," Tucker explained. As such, realistically anything that can lower those aforementioned costs for cash-strapped campaign managers, or can make volunteers more efficient in connecting with voters is a huge help.
Polis Politics helps "cut turfs" for its clientele by intelligently creating canvassing routes through an active, GPS-enabled map. The app combines a myriad of historic voter trend data to make those routes more efficient and worthwhile than simply knocking on random doors. Other elements, like walkable geography and street composition are considered as well.
Typically campaign teams will choose a region to target and then Polis Politics will organize information within those parameters to build a map-centric framework for how to run ground/field efforts. The app also brings readily available and customized surveys along with questionnaires to guide canvassers on the best way to speak with a prospective voter. A daily tracker will keep "score" and provide data related to how a canvaser is doing, what their total figures look like and how many remaining voters should be reached.
In short, Polis Politics has built a "how to canvass for dummies" app that compliments the work of a central campaign team by providing not only a smart route guide but also actionable, live insight that is inputted with every conversation.
In terms of a sales structure, Polis Politics employs a subscription model that is dependent on the size of voter records that a client would like sifted through for a canvassing mission. Providing a baseline fee is difficult because those price tags vary greatly based upon the specific organization or campaign in question and moreover, the records they bolster.
The team
Polis Politics technical co-founder Steven Liss was most recently working as a web developer for CrowdComfort, but was previously involved in the political campaign scene when he worked as a "war room analyst" for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign. Liss and Tucker met several months ago, while Liss was creating a wireframe version of Polis in Boston. Tucker, a Democrat, and Liss, a Republican, formed an unlikely partnership.
"Steven built a data visualization app for [Massachusetts] Governor Charlie Baker’s campaign in 2014, and that November a mutual friends introduced us. Given our similar goals, our friend guessed we’d become either best friends or mortal enemies, but we immediately realized our complementary skill sets could potentially start a very successful political tech company," Tucker recounted.
In time, and with both the help of Tucker and Polis Politics data scientist Emad Taliep, Liss' app evolved and became what it is today: Polis Politics. In recent months, the trio has worked to add more efficient routing, a larger variety of survey question types and a poll tracker for election day, Kendall said. An android app will be rolling out in January.
"Because of our frustrations with older political technology, user-friendliness is a top priority, and we’re constantly adapting to user feedback," she added.
Polis Politics' goal for 2016 will be centered around adding more customers; clients like nationwide non-profits, hundreds of state and federal races and thousands of local elections. The startup has been bootstrapped to date but will soon announce the close of a seed round led by an Boston-based angel investor syndicate group.
