The 2016 election cycle is almost over, but politics don't end on November 8 when the polls close. The local tech startups involved in helping or analyzing political campaigns are already looking ahead to the next one, while the companies that engage in the day-to-day of political engagement will have a whole new political landscape to engage with. We've picked out a few you should get to know as the next political cycle begins.
Spun out of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, NGP VAN offers software tools to improve the success of progressive political campaigns. The fundraising, communication and legal features access huge amounts of voter data as we learned in a recent Beat Podcast. The firm is helped in part by having sole access to the Democratic National Committee's voter files.
Phone2Action is a a digital communications platform for advocacy that connects the company's clients with elected officials. The idea is that people can directly send their opinions to lawmakers on the specific issues. The organizations that hire the company can organize people on those causes and then analyze the data on engagement. The company recently raised $5.25 million and expanded its headquarters into Virginia.
FiscalNote uses data analytics and machine learning to to create tools for advocay groups looking to influence federal, state and local governments. The company has raised more than $30 million and, after expanding to cover politics at the state level last year, now analyzes more than 1.5 million bills overall.
Quorum built an online legislative data analysis and aggregation platform in Boston before moving to D.C. in 2015. Lobbyists, non-profits and lawmakers use it to build out profiles of legislators related to various issues and then apply it to organizing campaigns on whatever their particular causes and goals might be.
BlueLabs spun out of the 2012 Obama for America team. Since then, it has worked as a data collection and analytics firm for causes and candidates affiliated with the Democratic Party or progressive causes in general as well as on behalf of some non-profits. BlueLabs has a specialty in creating statistical models of voter behavior, particularly how to change minds.
Polis, another Boston-born startup, developed a mobile app that is used to organize volunteers for political campaigns. Canvassing for voters is essentital, but expensive and time-intensive to organize. Polis uses data analytics to improve how "cutting turfs," setting up the canvassing strategy, is done, based on public information on local demographics and voting records.
LawIQ uses data analytics applied to legal and regulatory proceedings built around public data. The models are built out of millions of scanned documents on every company, judge and lawyer involved in a case. That data is then curated and formatted into useful intelligence. Lawyers, corporations and other clients can thus have a better understanding of legal cases and what to expect in terms of an outcome
