This article first appeared in The Connector, a newsletter on democracy, organizing, movements and tech.
Last week, I virtually attended New Media Ventures’ three-day annual summit, which showcased fourteen early-stage progressive entrepreneurs and organizers who are focusing on “building movements, changing narratives, sparking civic engagement, and shifting power.” Since its founding eleven years ago, NMV has played a key role in supporting the progressive use of technology in politics and civic engagement, often taking risky bets that traditional donors and investors would avoid. It was an early supporter of Swing Left, one of the post-2016 generation of resistance start-ups that went on to raise $27 million for candidates in 2020; it funded ActBlue’s decision to launch ActBlue Civics—its service for 501(c)(4s)—in 2012; and it bet early on Blavity, a Black media start-up, in 2015. Now Blavity is one of the fastest-growing digital media outlets online, reaching more than seven millennials a month. Other beneficiaries of its early support include Mobilize America (now called Mobilize, the Democratic volunteer management platform), the Movement Cooperative (a data- and tool-sharing network of progressive organizations), the Sunrise Movement (a youth-led movement against climate change) and Sister District (which organizes teams from blue areas working to help folks in purple and red states elect more progressive state legislators).
NMV has a hybrid model. It is both a funder as well as a fundraiser, acting as a scouting network for a loose group of angel investors, and using its modest platform (it has mobilized $50 million over ten years, but only about 20% of that has been direct funding) to spotlight rising talent and help progressive founders connect to other sources of backing. Shannon Baker, its managing director, notes “we have a network of hundreds of angel investors and donors (that has grown considerably steadily over the years), and we circulate all of our investments and grantees around to them, asking them to consider funding alongside us. This looks different depending on the size of the raise, for-profit vs nonprofit, etc. We work with peer investors to help founders close their for-profit rounds, and we introduce nonprofit funders to HNW individual donors, family offices, and foundation program officers.”
NMV has a c4 fund that supports political action start-ups, a c3 fund that both makes grants to c3 nonprofits and that invests in mission-driven for-profits where returns on investment help sustain its work, and a c3 that provides support, engagement and research to its community of entrepreneurs. (I should note here that I’m not a disinterested party; a lot of the people involved with NMV are friends and fellow travelers, including its new president Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, and they’ve got a glowing quote from me on their network page. So don’t expect much trademark Sifry snark in what follows.)
NMV’s 2020 round was its most competitive; the fourteen organizations it’s betting on this time came from a pool of 1400 applicants. In 2017, about 500 applied; in 2018, nearly 740 did. Over the years, it’s been interesting to see how NMV’s choices reflect or anticipate trends in the progressive tech and organizing sectors. In 2017, it bet heavily on “resistance” start-ups, several of which were completely new, like Daily Action, Flippable, Indivisible, Ragtag, Sister District, Swing Left and the Townhall Project. In 2018, as I noted in a write-up then, it continued to focus on strengthening progressive movement infrastructure related to election mobilization, but also supported a few groups focused on economic inclusion, like EARN.org, Pay Your Tuition and mRelief. And in 2019, it spread funds among 17 groups across six categories. Some were familiar verticals, such as data-driven tools (like Avalanche and Survey 160), electoral mobilizers (Contest Every Race, Swing Left/Flippable and Pulso), and economic inclusion accelerators (Upsolve, Community Connect Labs). And some were new or expanding areas of interest, like groups working to shift narratives like the Luz Collective, Prism and PeoplesHub, new movements like Sunrise, and strategic engagement shops that serve many types of progressive partners, like New/Mode.
With that in mind, here’s what stood out to me about the 14 organizations selected by NMV in its latest cohort.
First, “media and narrative” is becoming a higher priority for progressives, and in particular with a focus on constituencies that haven’t been centered by what you might call general progressive media. That’s how I see start-ups like The Juggernaut, SmokeSygnals, TILA Studios, Indiegraf, RAHEEM and A/B Partners, which were highlighted together on the second day of the summit. The Juggernaut is uplifting media focused on the South Asian diaspora; SmokeSygnals is a creative agency focused on Native Americans; TILA Studios is working to increase the representation of Black women artists; and RAHEEM is a reporting platform focused on fighting police violence. Indiegraf is an independent publishing platform; A/B Partners is a narrative studio led by Andre Banks.
Second, the progressive love affair with data and analytics and tools built on top of them shows no sign of abating. That’s where Open Field, a platform for building distributed phone-banks, canvasses and the like; Deck, a predictive targeting tool for campaigns; and Rapid Response, a package of tools for nonprofits who need to quickly create hotlines, mass notifications and the like, all fit in.
Third, and most intriguing to me, were NMV’s bets on movement-makers and advocacy organizations, which I think is somewhat of a new move. Its investment in Momentum, a training network that has incubated several new organizations in the last few years, most notably the Sunrise Movement but also IfNotNow (a Jewish anti-occupation group), COSECHA (which is building a movement of the undocumented), and #NeverAgainAction (an effort to resist family separation), was very much in NMV’s sweet spot of lifting up capacity builders. Likewise their investment in Three Point Strategies, an electoral strategy consultancy founded by three Black women, and their support for Climate Cabinet, a service agency providing climate policy advice to campaigns. But they also threw down for a group that you’ve probably never heard of up til now, and whose name is still provisional: Project Truth, Reconciliation, and Reparations. That’s the brain-child of Nicole Carty, a longtime Momentum trainer who got involved in movement organizing with Occupy a decade ago, and then the Movement for Black Lives. She and her co-founders are a BIPOC-led collective laying the groundwork for an intersectional mass movement to deal with the legacy of white supremacy once and for all.
NMV also made one other move in the advocacy arena worth noting, an investment in the Algorithmic Justice League, which is fighting for equitable and accountable Artificial Intelligence and against its harmful and biased use. Founded by MIT scholar Joy Buolamwini (and joined by my friend and colleague Sasha Costanza-Schock among others), AJL is at the cutting edge of the drive against facial recognition tech, and making waves across the whole spectrum of AI boosterism. As far as I know, this is the first time NMV has supported an organization that is critical of the ways data and tech can be used to discriminate against or manipulate others.
What I didn’t see were start-ups directly serving activists as individual consumers. Everything in the NMV universe is some form of a business-to-business project (even if the business in question is an activist organization or candidate campaign). Even though there are now 15 million individual donors in ActBlue’s donor file, for example, we’re not yet seeing robust start-ups trying to serve them as individual consumers of a service of interest to progressives. So, for example, while there may be intense dissatisfaction with ubiquitous social network platforms like Facebook, an upstart like Planetary, which was launched recently to be a Facebook-killer that fully respects users’ privacy and enables the easy formation of decentralized networks, didn’t make the NMV cut. I understand that—the chances of Planetary’s success against a behemoth like Facebook are slim. It may be that it’s still early days, and in the next year some of the existing progressive tech providers like Mobilize or Action Network will venture into direct services for individual activists. Or this may be a field that is just too risky for the folks attracted to NMV’s vision.
