Making It Real: Meet Countable
Written by Rachel Lourie.
We live in a world that’s quickly moving online, and politics and advocacy are no exception. Giving your advocates, members, and voters an online community in which they can actively engage with respect to your candidate or cause has never been easier with Countable’s innovative platform.
We sat down with Bart Myers, Founder and CEO, and Maya Berkman, Business Development Manager, to learn more.
A Description of Countable
“Countable Action consists of a series of technologies built around a core platform, which is intended to give political campaigns and causes access to products that help empower and engage their audiences. Our intent is to use technologies that work on your phone and web, so that wherever you are, you can reach and engage your audience and help to get them to take action around that campaign or cause. That action can be telling their story (using our video testimonial tool), interacting with lawmakers (with our lawmaker messaging tool), or engaging them with questions and issues and calls to action (using our action center — which is an umbrella platform that can serve as a home for your community.) Whether you’re looking to get your advocates organized, help them tell their stories, fundraise, you name it, Countable can help.”
The Idea Behind Countable
“We saw so much gridlock in Congress when we got started in 2014, and we wanted to do something about the lack of participation in government by everyday citizens. At the time, I was surveying the landscape from a tech/start up background, and I saw a great divide between San Francisco and Washington. When Countable got started, we were seeing a rise of mobile, rise of video, and an emergence of new technology platforms in the corporate world that had largely not yet been in used among campaigns and causes. We hypothesized that we could help to bring these technologies to campaigns and causes in a way that would be constructive, lean, easy-to-use, and incredibly effective. That has held true — the stuff we’ve built works incredibly well, and we’ve learned a great deal in terms of best practices around how to get the user to take action along the way.”
What Do Users Get?
“The deliverables vary depending on which tool within the platform you’re utilizing. One of our favorite, and most valuable, aspects of Countable Action is the video testimonial tool. Essentially, as long as a user has access to a phone or computer, they can click a button, record a video telling their story, and click submit. That information and video asset immediately becomes available to you online, where you can stream it, download it, edit it, and share it. With this and our other tools, you’ll have access to aggregated statistics on how different features are being used, as well as a host of information on the “who” behind each action.
Regardless of which of the various Countable Action tools you’re using, you’re giving your audience a series of tools and power that they haven’t had before. You’re empowering them, and saying ‘we want to make you part of our community, we want your help.’ Your advocates, members, and voters start to feel like they’re in a partnership with you, which is profound, and leads to a sense of trust. And we like to think that trust is the most valuable deliverable you’ll get out of Countable Action.”
What Makes Countable Unique?
“Many tools out there are highly targeted at achieving a specific aspect of a user’s journey — donation platforms, email platforms, legislator contact tools, etc. Countable Action is unique because we are an end-to-end goal-oriented platform. If your goal is to drive awareness around an issue, we’re not just one piece of that — we can be the entire flow. We can be the place where people discover the issue, engage with it, send a message, capture video, deliver video, and more. Once someone in your online community takes an action, we can keep that person engaged, helping you develop a relationship with your audience and form them into a community of actors who keep coming back. We think Countable is best suited for those who want to build long-term communities, not just a one-off campaign. It’s far cheaper to acquire a user once to your community than to do it for each campaign. The ROI for a client that’s looking to intentionally have a community do more than one thing can be pretty profound. That relationship with your community and audience is something you’ll continue to invest in by giving them updates, keeping them in the know, and asking them questions, and as you build that relationship, they’ll want to do something for you.”
How Did You Get Into Tech And Politics?
Bart: “I studied Political Science and International Studies in college. And then I interned at IBM, which turned into my job when I graduated. I was a developer with IBM, but I continued to have an interest in policy and politics. My parents are on different ends of the political spectrum, so I found myself in the middle of debates as a kid. I wanted to give people a way to participate in issues in a constructive manner, and that eventually turned into Countable.”
Maya: “I studied International Politics & Government in college. I didn’t grow up in a particularly politically active family, so my interest in politics was piqued as a student — mostly through a community organizing lens. I was actually originally a Countable user, and was so impressed with the platform that I applied for a job, and here I am!”
How Do You See Tech Shaping Politics, And Have You Come Across Any Exceptionally Innovative Tools Lately?
“Technology is having a massive impact on politics. We can point at the rise of campaigning technologies, online payments and small dollar donations, what both the Obama and Trump administrations were able to do with social media and social media data, microtargeting of messaging and advertising, recent events with Cambridge Analytica…all of these things are enabled through technology. For better or for worse, we’re seeing tech being used quickly and aggressively from a campaign standpoint.
What we’re not seeing it being used as effectively from a government standpoint. Congress, state capitals, municipal offices — these groups are often times using technologies that are antiquated. Many of the tools that have streamlined the work we do in the campaign and corporate world have not made their way into government yet. Which is a shame, because technological advances are happening quickly, and government leaders need to be able to adjust and adapt.
The rise of AI is going to have wide-sweeping impact on our society. For example — today you have taxi and Uber drivers, tomorrow we’ll have self driving cars. What’s going to happen to the people who were driving those taxis and Ubers? What new forms of labor are going to emerge? The answers to those questions are going to fall on our leaders to legislate and regulate, and it will be difficult for them to do so if they’re still using antiquated technology.”
Want to learn more? Contact Rachel Lourie, Senior Advisor at Agency Advisors, at rachel.lourie@agencyadvisors.org
At Agency Advisors, we bring new and innovative tech to candidates, causes, and the agencies that work on their behalf. This series aims to shed light on the leading-edge technologies that are creating a resounding impact within politics and advocacy.
