Why Groundlist?
Groundlist was designed by conservatives who were frustrated by the software available for managing political and advocacy campaigns.
A campaign needs software to do many things:
- Manage volunteers
- Send mail
- Send email
- Send texts
- Send social media messages
- Make phone calls
- Manage events
- Take donations
- Organize door-to-door work
- Manage a website
- Analyze voters
- See maps
- Deal with petitions
- (This list barely scratches the surface.)
Up to this point, you have had two choices:
- Get a single campaign software solution that costs a lot and does everything poorly, or
- Use different solutions for CRM, email, phone, donations and events and try to make them work together.
Anyone who has tried the second option knows how difficult and time-consuming it is.
A completely different solution
The key thing to understand about campaigns is that everything you do involves operating on a list of people. You gather contacts, analyze them, and communicate with them.
What if you could use many different applications, but have them operate on a common list of contacts? You could run a Facebook ad, take donations, and email the donors seamlessly. You'd have the best of all worlds.
That's what Groundlist does. It does one thing, and it does it really well: it manages lists and connects them, via plugins, to external applications.
At core, Groundlist is a political customer relationship management (CRM) system with an array of third-party plugins for a variety of campaign-related functions.
The plugins make it possible for your campaign software to do everything.
Suppose that you want to use some service that other campaign software simply hasn't implemented. You want to do a telephone town hall. Or an online Q & A. Or buy directly addressable cable TV, and know whether a household has seen your ad or not. Or do an automated telephone survey. Or have a high-volume texting interface.
If this other service has an API, we can build a plugin that talks to it. Or if you're technically inclined, you can build one yourself.
A completely different view of data
Data is the lifeblood of a campaign. And unfortunately, campaign software is where data goes to die.
A vast amount of valuable data is lost at the end of every election cycle because people don't want to pay to keep it around. Most campaigns pay for software, and then stop paying for it when the campaign is over. Their valuable lists disappear. No one is going to continue to pay a monthly fee for a campaign which is over.
Even if they export their data to a spreadsheet, it's hard to share. Someone has to go through the hassle of importing it into whatever system they're using, and then any updates to it never get shared back with the original owner.
What if you could just keep your data online between cycles and it didn't cost anything? What if you could easily share that data with others who might like to use it? What if you could easily sell your data? Or rent it?
And even better, what if you could buy data from others when you really needed it? Like voter files, or models, or phone numbers, or gun owners, or political reporters?
With Groundlist, all of those things are easy.
To share your list of contacts, you just click "Share", find the other person's account, and click "Ok". You can share the entire list, or just a subset. Your list shows up in their account. If you've given them permission to add to or update the list, then you see the changes. You can share your list with employees or other campaigns and work collaboratively.
Your data can have a life that goes beyond one election cycle or one organization.
A completely different business model
Groundlist is free.
We have made it free because we're committed conservatives and we're tired of losing. We can win a few more elections if conservatives have better software. The best way to get people to use the system is to make it free.
But Groundlist does need to make enough money to keep the lights on. We do it by taking a small fee if you choose to buy or sell data through our service.
Eventually, we'll have some low-cost plugins built into Groundlist itself, with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. For example, $X to send Y emails.
But the core Groundlist service is, and will remain, free.
