Data for Progress was not built to win some elections and then disappear. Nor is the youthful think tank and polling firm founded by serial socialist entrepreneur Sean McElwee seeking rapid expansion. At least, that’s not the plan according to McElwee.
“We’re very invested in steady organizational growth,” McElwee told Blue Tent. “We’ve seen progressive organizations blow up big and then crash.”
For McElwee and his small staff, rapid expansion should be an especially potent fear. McElwee’s whole pitch — which he and Data for Progress Vice President Julian Noisecat outlined in an interview with Blue Tent this summer— is that DFP will be a one-stop shop. Their team develops policy ideas, rigorously polls them, organizes the data, and uses their media savvy to get journalists and politicians to talk up their plans. No outside pollsters, no pricy PR firms.
While most progressives probably see “vertical integration” as little more than eye-roll-inducing Silicon Valley jargon, McElwee throws the term around because it’s accurate — it’s also reason to be cautious. When an organization decides it can do everything itself, suddenly hiring dozens of people and renting out sprawling offices in Midtown and K Street seems like the right move.
This was the major mistake made by Hustle, a texting service for progressive campaigns that McElwee cites as a cautionary tale. On the downside of a booming campaign cycle, the startup laid off more than a third of its then 100 employees in 2019. Such a bust could harm Data for Progress’s reputation, especially as 2020 election results did not lead to a sea change or progressive takeover of Democratic politics.
“My view is that the progressive world is much smaller than people realize,” McElwee told Blue Tent, “and if you piss off one person every month for 10 years, you’ve pissed off a lot more people than you might realize, and if one person every month loses confidence in your ability to deliver on what you say you’re gonna deliver and hold yourself to your word, then that’s bad for you as an organization.”
Funding is a “Three-Legged Stool”
When the time comes to expand, how will DFP get the money to pay for it all? The organization already operates with a substantial $3 million budget, according to McElwee, but it will undoubtedly need more to be the major Washington player its founder imagines.
For McElwee, funding is ideally built on a “three-legged stool.” The first leg is foundation money, where think tanks and public policy organizations have traditionally gotten their bread buttered. DFP was launched with the help of Tides Advocacy, which itself is a part of the massive Tides Foundation, a major funder of progressive causes. Tides remains DFP’s fiscal sponsor, while the organization has also received money from Way to Win, a network of wealthy, progressive funders, and Open Society Foundations.
The second leg of the stool is a base of small donors, a highly sought-after revenue stream for aggressive liberal organizations trying to break free of influence by the wealthy and powerful. DFP’s email list is slowly growing, surely helped by the organization’s popular social media presence.
The final and perhaps trickiest of the three legs is paid work for clients (“client-partners” in DFP-speak). Simply put, Data for Progress wants to get paid to put its polling, media and policy expertise to use for other people, but only for the right people.
“We don’t have any interest in working for corporate clients,” McElwee said
DFP could theoretically make a killing working with big business, as other polling firms do, but the ethical waters are too murky for McElwee’s liking.
“One of the reasons we are in this business is because I think that we’re at war with certain forces that are arrayed against racial justice, climate justice in this country,” McElwee said. “And to me, the idea of a firm working for both sides of that war is like an arms dealer dealing on both sides of an arms race.”
While turning down corporate work admittedly isn’t great for DFP’s bottom line, McElwee and Noiscat note that they could prove the efficacy of a new funding model for left institutions. Likewise, without big business interests to look out for, DFP has instead been able to focus on helping small progressive groups, like Bay Area environmental activists seeking to shut down a local Chevron plant.
“We were able to arm a lot of those folks with very powerful research that helps advance their position,” Noisecat told Blue Tent.
“And sometimes, we were able to do that completely for free, because we have those tools at our disposal.”
Letting 1000 Left Think Tanks Bloom
So what can other ambitious wonks looking to blaze their own trail learn from DFP’s first few years? To McElwee, it’s all about patience and focus.
“It takes a long time to build, it takes a lot of work,” McElwee said. “We actually built up faster than other organizations, but it still took more than two years from just being three data scientists doing stuff in their free time to this whole organization.”
In that time, DFP also did a wide array of data analysis, such as measuring student debt in congressional districts, before finding its niche.
“It turned out that the thing we kept coming back to was polling, polling, polling,” McElwee said.
Nonprofit entrepreneurs need to be patient and try different ideas, he advises, but their goal should be to eventually settle on a specialty and tailor their work toward it. “Sticking to polling, sticking to core areas for us,” McElwee said, “has allowed us to iterate, rather than be drawn into too many areas where we’re out of our depth.”
“There are a lot of organizations that just try to do too many things, take on too many projects, they end up burning out.”
