An Urgent Moment for The Movement Cooperative, a Progressive Election Infrastructure Hub

For more than five years, The Movement Cooperative has been working to share access to the high-impact technology and voter turnout infrastructure the progressive electoral sphere needs to win.

Launched against the backdrop of the anti-Trump resistance in 2018, The Movement Cooperative (TMC) leverages the power of collective purchasing to obtain jointly held data and technology licenses for databases and digital tools critical to contacting voters and mobilizing supporters, as well as providing members with access to remote-working, back-end technology staff.

Today, the nonprofit corporation counts more than 80 organizations as members. A mix of established and emerging progressive advocacy groups, its members run advocacy campaigns on everything from climate change to racial justice and include everyone from the Alliance for Youth Action, Black Voters Matter, and the Rural Democracy Institute to VotoLatino and the Working Families Party. Other large national groups among its members include major established players such as Common Cause, Greenpeace, MoveOn and NARAL.

TMC CEO Julia Barnes called “access to voter databases, organizing tools and the specialized staffing it takes to run data-driven programs… the backbone of everything these organizations use for democracy work.”

“TMC is the connective tissue of everything that works above ground,” Barnes said. “It’s like electricity: We take it for granted that we can flick a light switch on and off but if the power plant fails, there is no electricity anywhere. All these organizations need ‘electricity,’ or, in our case, sophisticated data infrastructure. It’s critical to their work.”

Over the years, TMC’s backers have included the Open Society Foundations and the David Rockefeller Fund; these institutional grantmakers supplement dues from member organizations, which pay based on the level or tier of service they opt into and their organization's annual budget. That allows larger organizations such as MoveOn to supplement the costs for smaller groups, which was part of the objective of creating the cooperative, explained Amy White, chief technology and data officer at MoveOn and treasurer of the board at TMC. Since its founding, the cooperative’s membership has initiated over 1 billion voter outreach attempts via the software tools and digital platforms membership provides.

But nonprofit dues aren’t enough to keep the lights on. In this election year, it will cost the organization $15 million to support members and pursue research and knowledge-sharing initiatives, according to TMC chief development officer Andrea Catone. Two-thirds of that budget is covered through membership dues and existing revenue streams. About one-third of the organization’s funding comes from foundations and other donors. Currently, the cooperative has a $3.4 million gap in funding, Catone said.

It’s important for funders to understand the value of this kind of work, said Barnes, and what sort of investment they’re making. Any dollar that philanthropic partners give to TMC doesn’t just support TMC, it helps make TMC accessible for dozens of other organizations. Currently the group says its reach extends to more than 1,300 state, local and national organizations.

“Giving for civic infrastructure puts the rocket fuel directly into the programs of the movement,” Barnes said. “We are fighting for the fabric of democracy right now.”

Funders fuel front-line democracy protection work

Since 2020, the David Rockefeller Fund has granted $320,000 to support TMC, including recently renewing funding for it through the pro-democracy All by April campaign. (See IP’s story on that initiative.)

Cristina Fernandez, a program officer at the David Rockefeller Fund, explained the fund’s view on the importance of the investment: “Given the critical need to build power for and defend voting rights within the front-line communities most disproportionately affected by the climate crisis, we fund TMC through our climate program, especially at the intersection of democracy protection and urgent efforts to advance environmental justice.”

Resourcing infrastructure organizations like TMC is vital to ensuring an informed electorate and protecting the integrity of elections, according to Fernandez. The foundation also provides general operating support to a number of TMC’s member organizations.

“TMC takes on the role of navigating an increasingly costly and technical issue advocacy and voter outreach ecosystem on behalf of its members,” Fernandez observed. “TMC provides the necessary data, technology and research infrastructure to sustain nonpartisan civic engagement and voter education efforts led by nonprofit grassroots movement partners across a range of issue areas,” she added.

By funding TMC, Fernandez said, donors can see a powerful return on investment in two ways: the large cost savings that TMC generates for its members and the ability to enable TMC’s member organizations to direct a greater share of their resources toward advancing their programmatic goals and organizational missions.

Still, it can be challenging to make the case for election-related infrastructure work. Many funders concentrate their giving within a specific issue or policy domain, while infrastructure work impacts advocacy efforts across an array of high-stakes areas.

It’s not enough for funders to provide one-off grants to support infrastructure work during election years. Continuous, multi-year support over the long term, said Fernandez, is essential to ensuring the sustainability of key functions, such as research and learning capacities that enable infrastructure organizations to refine and build upon their models based on the lessons they uncover over time.

“When we run election programs, having accurate and up-to-date information is essential. We’re usually using multiple tools that don't always speak to each other,” said Amity Foster, data director at ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota. “TMC helps manage and sometimes even create integrations, providing us with real-time insights into our programs. This capability allows us to make strategic, data-driven shifts quickly. If we can’t do those quick program adjustments, we can’t use our resources wisely.”

“The word ‘infrastructure’ is not sexy,” said Barnes, “but it’s the most important thing for the movement on the front lines of protecting democracy.” Without solid, supported and innovative technical infrastructure, she added, the movement is just “spinning its wheels” and “wasting precious resources.”

Unglamorous but urgent resources

A sense of urgency and existential necessity may characterize this election year, but it can be hard for donors to grasp the tangibles of what urgently supporting infrastructure actually looks like. For example, MoveOn has access to aggregate voter file and commercial data through TargetSmart and Catalyst Data Solutions. They use OpenField for door-to-door canvassing, EveryAction for compliance reporting and volunteer recruitment tracking and the online platform Mobilize America for event hosting. Other groups manage data through BigQuery, a serverless, multicloud data warehouse.

“We use the voter file for voter outreach including persuasion engagement, volunteer recruitment and get-out-the-vote efforts through phone calls, postcards, text messages, door-to-door canvassing and paid digital ads,” MoveOn’s White explained.

The organization also uses data files to do sophisticated data science modeling and predictions to identify the best message to use for a given voter, to predict who is most likely to engage as a volunteer or to identify a target audience of voters that the group is likely to be able to influence.

“Matching our millions of members to the voter file records has also allowed us to learn more about who our members are and what issues they care most about. Having year-round, affordable access to this trove of valuable data has fundamentally changed the way we do our work and significantly increased our ability to make an impact,“ said White.

It’s also saved the organizations tens of thousands of dollars each year — money that can be put directly toward programs rather than overhead.

For members, TMC’s independence is also a major draw card. “With so much of the democratic data and tech infrastructure being consolidated by a corporate-owned monopoly, it is more important than ever to invest in movement-owned infrastructure,” said Brittany Bennett, chief technology officer of the Working Families Party. “Without investment in cooperatives like TMC, civic engagement efforts risk being beholden to corporate interests rather than serving the needs of communities and movements driving for real democratic change.”

In one year, Working Families Party was able to make more than 700,000 phone calls, knock on 500,000 doors, and send over 6,000,000 texts for around 800 Working Families Party-endorsed candidates, thanks, in large part, to its TMC membership, said Bennett.

Bennett also spoke to the sustainability imperative. “Civic engagement and electoral organizing efforts too often suffer from a cycle of building up data and tech capabilities only to have that infrastructure dismantled after each election season,” she said. “It’s like building a house from straw again and again, rather than constructing a durable building from bricks. This constant churn is inefficient and prevents compounding progress.”

“Having a central, evergreen entity like TMC overseeing core data and technology infrastructure is crucial for making sure those resources persist and continue to be improved upon from one cycle to the next.”

Ron Goines, director of resource strategy and development at The Movement 4 Black Lives, agreed. “The tools, data and overall infrastructure that organizations depend on to mount critical civic engagement campaigns is in the hands of private equity, where more often than not, profit is the goal and not participation, access or equity,” Goines said. “Support for an organization like TMC can help even the playing field and foster a culture of collaboration and cooperation. Shared infrastructure that supports shared work is how movements have always succeeded.”

Still, convincing people to invest in infrastructure is not just an external messaging challenge but can be an internal one, as well, said Goines, who points to “the invisible nature” of the work as a factor.

“It's up to us to illuminate the value chain,” he said. “If TMC closed their doors tomorrow, the progressive movement would be severely crippled. There are people who do pieces of what they do but no one encompasses as big a universe as they do in this space.”

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to clarify details around institutional funders’ support for TMC.

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