Our Story: Becoming A Transformative Force
What started with a vision to mobilize advocates on smart phones has exploded into a comprehensive suite of tools that is revolutionizing government affairs.
We know why you got into government affairs. To change minds and drive outcomes. That’s what we help our clients do every day. We build the intelligence and advocacy tools to monitor and influence public policy from Capitol Hill to city hall.
Mission
Make it easier to access intelligence, uncover insights and engage the public and other key stakeholders.
How We Do It
Our innovative platform delivers the intelligence and insights you need to make informed and impactful decisions wherever you are, and the ability to engage and mobilize people with our pioneering suite of advocacy tools.
History
It started as a quest to solve a problem. Before 2012, organizations who wanted to mobilize supporters to engage in the democratic process had to do it manually. Phone calls. Letters. Mailing lists. It was daunting and difficult to motivate people. And when you did, mobilizing and managing them presented its own extraordinary list of challenges.
We knew there had to be a better way, so we set out to build one—to literally put the power to change the world in the palms of people’s hands. Ximena Hartsock came up with the idea when she was organizing tens of thousands people across the country on education policy. Her vision was simple: make it easier for people to share their feedback on policy directly to lawmakers using the phones they already had in their pocket. Jeb Ory who had built a few mobile technology companies and had a passion for policy and Ximena got together and started to work on what would become Phone2Action. We built for the advocate—when they are on the move—so everything had to be mobile-first, easy to use and enjoyable. We also built for the advocacy team, giving them a fully-customizable suite of tools to acquire, engage and mobilize their supporters.
We quickly became the leader in advocacy. More than 100 million messages have been sent using Phone2Action, and 25% of all messages to Congress go through our action centers.
The more we worked with government affairs teams, the more we saw firsthand how much they’ve been hamstrung by an endless sea of information they need to understand, but don’t always have the time, staff or budget to digest (no matter how hard they try).
So we set out on a new quest, this time to help the entire government affairs department know more, do more, and win more policy battles. We wanted to unify the work of advocacy and intelligence in a single platform designed explicitly for government affairs.
This new quest led us to make two exciting acquisitions. In the fall of 2020, we brought on board the number-one source of policymaker contact information, KnowWho, and the most intuitive toolset for federal, state, and local intelligence, GovPredict.
As we look to the future, we see government affairs departments where everyone knows exactly what’s going on at the local, state, and federal levels; knows exactly whose opinions need to be changed; and moves decisively with lobbying, grasstops, and grassroots campaigns.
We want one simple thing. To give you the edge. You can get into the room. You can change hearts and minds. We can arm you to win every time.