A New Website Wants Campaigns to Rate Their Consultants

A new website is asking campaigns and committees to crowdsource reviews of consultants and vendors.

CampaignGrade, which launched late last month, works like any other review site. Think Glassdoor or Rate My Professors. Campaign and committee staffers can rate the vendors and consultants they worked with in a given cycle on a scale of one-to-five stars, touching on everything from responsiveness to budget transparency and strategy quality.

The project is the work of Jackson McMillan, a 24-year-old Democratic consultant and law school student based out of St. Petersburg, Fla. In a phone interview with Campaigns & Elections on Monday, McMillan said that the idea behind CampaignGrade is to offer candidates – especially newcomers – a greater sense of transparency in the often-opaque business of politics.

“I don’t know that I’ve encountered a single candidate running for office, at any level, that hasn’t felt that they’ve been, at a minimum, disappointed or taken advantage of by staff or a consultant or a vendor at some point,” said McMillan, who runs the small fundraising firm Key Lime Strategies. 

For now, at least, the website is intended to be used by Democrats and non-party-affiliated campaigns. That’s in part because of the urgency of this particular moment for Democrats, McMillan said. Democrats are fighting to reclaim control of the House – and potentially even the Senate – this year, and the party and its candidates need to be smart about where and how they spend their money, McMillan said.

“I think part of the reason we lose so often is that we spend a lot of money, but it’s spent poorly,” he said. “And sometimes, there are genuine bad actors in the space.” 

McMillan acknowledged that there are risks in crowdsourcing reviews and consultants and firms, especially in an industry where reputation and relationships mean everything. CampaignGrade only allows verified campaigns and committees to submit reviews on the platform. On top of that, reviewers have to prove that they worked with the consultant or firm that they’re rating by providing documentation, like an invoice or stream of communication. 

McMillan said that the website also moderates the content allowed to appear on the platform. “You can give someone a one-star review and say they were hard to work with, but you can’t just badmouth someone or accuse them of any crime for example,” he said.

He also stressed that there’s not a financial incentive in launching the website. CampaignGrade is free to use and doesn’t have any monetization elements baked into it. And McMillan said he has no plans to do so in the near future.

Asked about his reason for creating the review website, McMillan said that the project was simply born out of necessity. First-time candidates, especially those running for state and local offices, are often tasked to run by party and committee leaders, and then left to figure things out themselves. 

“It’ll make running for office, as someone who’s not connected to the political space, a lot easier. You don’t need to know somebody or know somebody who knows somebody,” McMillan told C&E. “This kind of thing just needs to exist in the space. There could be some potential issues, but I think it’ll be a net boon.”