Apps in Politics Provide a World of Progress
With tech giants like Facebook and Amazon suffering from unfavorable news over the past few months, the public has grown uneasy about the prospect of tech in private and political life. Reasons for suspicions are abound. In March, reporters announced that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used the personal Facebook data of more than 50 million users without consent to target voters for President Trump’s campaign in 2016. With data-security concerns threatening our trust in tech companies, we naturally ask ourselves — technology is certainly a sensation, but how do we make it moral?
Through the volatility in the front pages, however, strength of perspective often comes from holding off on premature conclusions and looking deeper into what the headlines may overshadow. Let’s shift our attention to some of the countless entrepreneurs who are developing new apps to democratize democracy, harvest truth, and help politicians perform more efficiently.
NationBuilder is a “software for leaders” that provides users with tools to build communities and move them to action, whether to start a non-profit organization, run a political campaign, or build brand advocacy. A one-stop shop for jump-starting movements, NationBuilder allows users to build a branded website, import contact lists for targeted emails, and integrate multiple social media accounts for efficient outreach. Other features include a finances dashboard that will track fundraising data and process payments directly from the site. These resources that presidential campaigns have traditionally built for millions of dollars only cost 20 dollars a month. As VP of Strategy Hilary Doe describes, NationBuilder is “democratizing democracy” by allowing anyone to mount a campaign and have a fighting chance without institutional backing.
Aside from its practical benefits, Doe notices three behaviors in successful candidates that leverage tech to differentiate themselves in political campaigns. First, holistic data and profiles allow candidates to “put people at the center” by engaging with constituents in more personal ways. Second, its pipeline features allow for a more refined sense of engagement ladder, which entails deepening supporter engagement by providing a framework of increasingly important steps that lead to a final goal (if you donated already, the next step is to fund-raise). Most importantly, tech facilitates the distribution of leadership. The most successful candidates fundamentally understand that one crew is not enough — leadership needs to be delegated across entire networks outside the original team. By facilitating such connections between candidates and their supporters, NationBuilder is transforming the political arena into a less arbitrary and more equitable selection process based on the merit of candidates and their ability to connect with their constituents.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s rise to power in May 2017 was a historical feat that demonstrated the power of NationBuilder’s sophisticated digital tools. Not only was Macron the youngest candidate to become president in France, but he was also the first one that came outside of the established left and right parties that have dominated French politics for decades. The presidential elections of 2017 were no exception before his rise; on the extreme left, Mélenchon held an anti-EU position, and on the far right, Marine Le Pen maintained her hard-liner stance on anti-immigration policies. Out of this polarized political landscape, Macron appealed to his electorate with the vision of rising above the traditional politics of the country to address major issues the country is facing.
Before the elections, Macron was merely known as a former member of the Socialist Party and the Minister of Economy. Without the institutional backing of a major political party, Macron’s legislative team used NationBuilder to build a party from the ground up and empower a diverse group of candidates to join the new party. Macron went on to win 350 seats in Parliament within a month, completely shifting the dynamics of French politics. According to Flore Blondel-Goupil, Enterprise Account manager at NationBuilder, the Macron team was able to use digital infrastructure to handle its huge swath of voters, which allowed the team to think “in terms of hundreds instead of dozens.”
NationBuilder is just one of many civic tech apps that are changing the political landscape into a more collaborative and equitable public forum. Predata is a predictive platform that analyzes conversational metadata on the internet to signal upcoming volatility in geopolitics and markets. By complementing human judgment with quantitative probabilities, the platform is helping policy makers make more informed and unbiased decisions. Another DC-based start-up called Quorum seeks to make sense of the overwhelming noise on social media by integrating data on stakeholder engagement, grassroots advocacy, and legislative tracking into its database. If you want to follow a member of Congress, you can access integrated information on their bills, tweets, Facebook posts, press releases, and floor statements on Quorum. Corporations can also use Quorum to facilitate stakeholder engagement. When President Trump criticized Toyota, the multinational automobile manufacturer used Quorum’s database and communication features to defend its position, quickly managing stakeholder worries.
Technology has been so entrenched in our lives that it is bound to elicit fear and resistance. While much work needs to be done before society can find a suitable moral compass for technology in politics, we as developers, investors, citizens, and mere participants of the Internet have a stake in driving that change by watching and using the products of socially-minded entrepreneurs.
