United Independents, the group behind the Independent National Convention set for Denver in September, has launched a new software platform for indie candidates called Electify, which came out of a partnership with incubator Wolfram Labs — the first tool to emerge from its program.
“With Wolfram Labs, our goal and mission is to bring new innovation into the space of political tech for the betterment of democracy as a whole,” said Dana Cichon, a co-founder of the incubator and now chief product officer of United Independents Tech and the CTO of Electify.
“And so we started working with United Independents earlier this year and [I] came on board to help them launch Electify, which is one of the platforms that they’re building for the movement as a whole.”
Cichon believes that the market is growing for service providers targeting independent candidates. She pointed to the popularity of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential effort as an example. “What we’re seeing in politics right now is a seismic shift away from traditional party affiliations. The dynamics are changing. What we’ve seen with RFK is a huge movement of energy across the board of people wanting a third party, they want another choice,” Cichon said, although noting that Kennedy’s campaign is not yet a client.
Still, it’s not just presidential-level candidates who this platform can help, she added.
“It’s local, state, nationwide, and the market as a whole…[I]t’s something that our industry, I think, looks at as very small, but in reality [the independent market is] quite large.
“The problem with the independent movement as a whole, traditionally it has [had] an inability to organize, not having a central hub to find each other, to find the resources and find the tech,” Cichon said. “And so it’s been a very fragmented movement overall. That’s why you don’t see a lot of independent candidates running for office in the first place.”
There are no shortages of non-profit or politically focused CRMs on the market, but Cichon said that indie candidates can often get shut out of partisan solutions. She said her product team built Electify from scratch without a model.
“Based on what we know about the space, we know what campaigns need in order to win,” she said. “There are a suite of essential [tools that] all candidates need.
“They need a CRM, they need test management, they need something to send emails and text messages. They need to [host] events, they need voter mapping tools, they need compliance tools.
“And so Electify is an all in one platform. It is truly unique in that it does encompass everything. There aren’t that many tools that do it all well.”
