Citizen Data
Model & Strategy
The Problem
Today’s data providers drive Americans into pre-existing echo chambers of support, further dividing our nation and leaving social impact organizations looking to combat today’s toughest modern challenges without the ethical, high-quality data, insights, and tools they need. While misinformation-focused extremes operate highly sophisticated and well-funded data machines highlighting what divides us, information to build consensus and engagement is underfunded and ignored. Non-partisan, cross-partisan, and bipartisan groups do not have the same trusted actionable data and tools needed to reach those who are disenfranchised, disengaged, and under-informed. As divisions in our nation increase, the need for smart data that identifies commonalities and opportunities for perspective shifts only becomes more important.
The Solution
Citizen Data is bringing nonpartisan, best-in-class data, insights, and tools to organizations addressing America’s toughest challenges. Built on a data foundation of 240M Americans, Citizen Data provides partners with a sophisticated, secure AWS-based tech platform that offers real-time, unique insights and intelligence on critical audiences to assess intended impact and behavior over time. Citizen Data’s proprietary regenerative tech platform creates results based on hard data, ensuring every survey issued can be traced back to a voter with over 500 attributes. Citizen Data is constantly innovating research and data analysis, regularly deploying additional offerings to exceptional polling and data insights using natural language processing (social listening), randomized control trial experimentation, and large-scale focus groups.
Citizen Data envisions becoming a $45M company that impacts billions of people in philanthropic and corporate social impact decisions and programs across democracy, civic engagement, environmental, social equity, community resilience, and other priorities by 2025.
Growing up with a single mom who frequently tested new technology and built a business out of the family’s garage, Mindy Finn started her career imagining the possibilities for charting an unconventional career path. After covering Congress as a journalist during 9/11, Mindy parlayed her basic coding skills into pioneering digital strategies for political and advocacy campaigns from small towns to the White House. After key roles in two presidential campaigns, she started her first company, Engage, which introduced new methods for running political campaigns online. She also built civic initiatives for Google, Twitter, and Change.org.
Mindy’s passion for giving voice to more Americans, and building a strong democracy, flourished after 2016 when she ran as an independent vice presidential candidate on a pro-democracy ticket that earned the most write-in votes of any presidential ticket in history. From there, Mindy saw an opportunity to strengthen and protect democracy through a new shared data infrastructure providing the tools and insights to bridge divides, unite Americans, and drive solutions to better representation and for a healthy, resilient, and more peaceful America.
Impact
Citizen Data created the Trusted Elections Playbook, a toolkit to inform election officials on messaging during the election cycle, especially to counter misinformation and disinformation.
Citizen Data led a coalitional effort to aggregate over 2,000,000 participants in the electoral reform movement, which laid the groundwork for collaborations to pass reforms in Alaska, Nevada, and beyond on Rank Choice Voting/Final Five Voting.
