Organizer is looking to expand its client list beyond campaigns through a new partnership with Catalist.
The deal doesn’t make Catalist the app’s sole data provider – it remains data agnostic. But it will make transferring data easier and improve hygiene for clients who use Catalist data, according to Liam Speden, Organizer’s CEO.
“The expertise [Catalist] has in terms of matching and cleaning data means you’re almost turning a field contact into a Twitter feed,” said Speden. “It can trigger all kinds of events from email to social. We don’t see field as being separate, we see it as an integral part of a campaign engaging with their audience.”
The mobile app company, which is based in California and began life as a Silicon Valley startup roughly five years ago, has made its name as a field tool, but is now trying to expand. Organizer’s now targeting expanding its relationships with AFSCME and SEIU, and signing up activist groups like America Votes, which used the app in Florida in 2014 and is mulling a return in 2016, the company said.
“This is all about making it easier to get data into Organizer and then get it back out. It enriches the data and allows customers to really leverage the data they’re collecting,” said Speden. “[Catalist] has that quality of data related to voters and labor membership.”
Now, Speden said this was one a series of partnerships the company plans to rollout – it partnered with California data provider PDI in February — as it looks to grow beyond being a canvassing tool for liberal campaigns. In fact, the company, which boasts of having assisted with knocking on some 6 million doors, no longer sees itself as a “purely political tool” and is “investing a lot” in its expansion strategy, said Speden.