The Labor-Focused CRM That Powered Mamdani’s Volunteer Base

If Zohran Mamdani wins Tuesday’s New York City mayoral election – and, according to polling, he likely will – he’ll have an army of volunteers to thank for elevating a campaign that once seemed like a longshot.

Behind the campaign’s 95,000 volunteers – who have ramped up their outreach in the closing days of the mayoral race – is a critical piece of infrastructure called Solidarity Tech, an all-in-one CRM that has quietly handled the grunt work of following up with volunteers, sending calendar invites and ensuring that supporters show up where they’re needed.

Solidarity Tech, which launched last year, traces its origins to efforts to organize rideshare drivers in California. Its founder Ivan Pardo, a labor organizer and software developer, said that those origins make it particularly useful for “people-powered campaigns,” like Mamdani’s operation, which has relied heavily on its ability to turn viral attention into volunteer action and turnout. 

When a potential supporter sees a piece of online content from Mamdani’s campaign, they’re given the option to click through to a volunteer sign-up page that then enters their information into Solidarity Tech’s CRM, which handles the logistics of actually getting people to turn out for Mamdani. 

“Once somebody comes to one event or engages with a piece of content, you need to try to develop their level of commitment to the campaign – to follow up with them, get people to commit to come to other events, share links with their friends,” Pardo said in an interview with Campaigns & Elections. 

Solidarity Tech, Pardo said, “kind of initiates that personal connection” with supporters that the campaign can then build on. Because tasks like event reminders are integrated into the system, it saves the campaign from having to manually reach out to supporters, allowing existing volunteers and campaign workers to focus on other priorities.

“The idea is to help identify and develop leadership within the organization in a really systematic way that is more suited for a campaign like Zohran’s,” Pardo said.

Solidarity Tech is still a newcomer in the political campaigns space. Mamdani’s campaign is the first major U.S. race to use the volunteer CRM. Just this year, in Ireland, President-elect Catherine Connolly’s campaign relied on Solidarity Tech through a custom integration with the messaging app WhatsApp. Most of Solidarity Tech’s clients are in the labor movement, according to Pardo. And by his own admission, he’s “more interested in labor” than he is in the politics business. 

But he argued that there are some key lessons that political candidates and campaigns can take from the broader labor movement. 

“With the labor movement, one of the beautiful things about it is you don’t get to choose who you’re organizing with,” Pardo said. “The boss chooses who your coworkers are and you’re forced to work with them and build consensus and build a majority.”

In the case of Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist began his campaign with little name recognition or campaign cash. His main opponent in the Democratic primary was Andrew Cuomo, a former New York governor from a well-heeled political family. But after a campaign that focused relentlessly on affordability in New York City, Mamdani appears to have won over his share of converts. 

Recent polls show Mamdani leading Cuomo – now running as an independent – by double digits. A survey released last week by Marist University found Mamdani with a 16-point edge in the race. 

Pardo said that Mamdani was able to successfully harness an “untapped energy” within the Democratic Party’s base. Solidarity Tech, he added, was simply there to help turn that energy into “collective action.”

“At the beginning, this was software for worker-to-worker organizing, and now it’s more than that,” Pardo said. “But the core is still about talking to your coworkers or your neighbors to work toward a collective action.”