Progressive Nonprofits Partner on “Movement-aligned” Tech
The Movement Cooperative, a nonprofit that provides data and tech support to progressive groups, announced that it would partner with the nonprofit tech platform Action Network to provide a suite of organizing and fundraising tools to its members.
The partnership, shared first with Campaigns & Elections, comes nearly a year after TMC began soliciting proposals for new voter data and contact systems amid broader concerns in the progressive ecosystem that existing tech platforms haven’t kept pace with the needs of the campaigns and organizations they’re built to serve.
The collaboration with Action Network is separate from that search, TMC’s CEO Julia Barnes said. Rather, it deepens a previously “less-connected” partnership between the two organizations and gives TMC’s members access to tools that are “responsive to movement needs.”
“We’re really interested in what this is going to mean for the future of cooperative development and tech choices,” Barnes told C&E. “It’s very rare in this space that data infrastructure providers are building meaningfully alongside the users in real time.”
Launched in 2012, Action Network bills itself as an open platform built in collaboration with movement-aligned activists and organizations, like the AFL-CIO and MoveOn. The partnership with TMC will give the group’s members access to Action Network’s full suite of offerings, including email, fundraising and event tools.
Democrats and progressives have found themselves in the middle of a deeper conversation about tech infrastructure in recent years, with some questioning the long-term viability of platforms like NGP VAN and ActBlue, which have powered Democrats’ voter data and fundraising efforts for decades.
Last year, shortly after TMC issued its request for proposals for a new voter data system, the Democratic National Committee began soliciting proposals for “a broad range of potential tools, from systems that bring innovation to managing voter and volunteer data to platforms that facilitate ongoing voter outreach and volunteer engagement.”
Brian Young, Action Network’s founder and executive director, said that both of those RPFs stem from a similar concern about the sustainability of political tech, both from a business perspective and an ideological perspective.
In short, Young said, tech is expensive and political tech doesn’t generate the returns that venture capital and for-profit businesses often expect.
“When it comes to mobilizing people around activism goals – organizing people around communities instead of around economic transactions – there are needs that are different,” Young told C&E in an interview.
“The assumptions that go into building tech, the assumptions about the relationships between people and the types of communication that happen between people, those assumptions ripple out through the technology. That’s why movement-aligned tech matters.”
Updated on Feb. 12 at 11:38 a.m.
