Movement organizations balance voter engagement, outreach, data management, volunteer coordination, and long-term relationship-building all at once, often across systems that don’t talk to one another or format data the same way. At the same time, organizations are being asked to move quickly, adapt constantly, and do more with less in rapidly changing political and organizing environments.
That’s why shared infrastructure and collaboration matter, and it’s those exact challenges that TMC membership solves for. Here’s how two of our members are making organizing more sustainable through tool integration and technical support, then using the time they get back to deepen relationships, strengthen outreach, and better understand the impact of their organizing.
Using Data to Deepen Organizing
How TMC supports our members looks different across organizations. At We The People Michigan (WTPMI), where they focus on building long-term grassroots power through deep community relationships, Data and Technology Program Director Kate Atkinson and their team used TMC support to build stronger systems around relationship-based organizing and long-term ladders of engagement.
We The People Michigan organizers and volunteers at Power Camp. Photo courtesy of @wethepeople_actionfund on Instagram (March 2026).
WTPMI analyzed how one-on-one conversations influenced engagement and retention over time and found that people attended 2.5–3x more events after a one-on-one conversation and stayed involved with WTPMI longer overall. WTPMI used BigQuery and Hex, tools they access through their TMC membership, to build dashboards and workflows based on those findings.
Using their new dashboards, WTPMI organizers can pull up an event and quickly see attendee follow-up history, including whether someone has had a one-on-one since attending, when their last conversation happened, or whether someone needs to follow up. This gives organizers clearer visibility into relationship-building efforts and helps teams support long-term engagement more intentionally.
And when WTPMI runs into difficulties or puzzles on the journey to develop Michigan’s next cohort of progressive leaders, they rely on the TMC community as a brain trust to crowdsource solutions from their movement peers.
Building Better Systems for Voter Outreach
Environmental Voter Project (EVP), a nonprofit focused on turning inconsistent environmental voters into consistent voters across 21 states, shared a different example of how TMC support strengthened their practical outreach.
Environmental Voter Project canvassers prepare for voter outreach during a 2024 general election canvass in partnership with Third Act in Philadelphia, featuring climate activist Bill McKibben.
For Data and Operations Director Peter Polga-Hecimovich and their team at EVP, volunteer phone banking is a primary voter contact method. That makes phone number accuracy critical—not only for effective outreach, but also for creating a positive experience for volunteers.
After noticing that phone number accuracy had been declining over time, the EVP team worked with TMC to identify the phone numbers most likely to be accurate for voter outreach, using multiple layers of verification and successful contact history.
Together, TMC and EVP built a workflow designed to improve phone number selection and make voter outreach more efficient and sustainable. While the first round of testing produced mixed results, the collaboration surfaced important insights that are already shaping the next iteration of the work.
As TMC and EVP continue refining this workflow, Peter hopes it will help staff and volunteers spend less time troubleshooting disconnected or inaccurate numbers, so they can direct volunteer energy and staff capacity into having more meaningful conversations with voters. EVP’s voter universe stays consistent throughout the calendar year, so the team will be able to test the workflow again ahead of the general election using additional call data from their primary election efforts.
The first round of testing also gave EVP an important new insight. Because the workflow produced results similar to their original default phone number exports, the team now believes the export process itself may not be contributing as much to phone number accuracy issues as they originally thought. That insight will help guide the next iteration of the work. As Peter Polga-Hecimovich put it, “This knowledge in itself is a big win for us.”
That collaborative mindset is central to how TMC works with members. Innovation isn’t always about finding the perfect solution on the first try. It’s about testing ideas, learning from the results, and continuing to improve together.
What Shared Infrastructure Makes Possible
Across the board, organizations that want to innovate and experiment with new tactics can be challenged by the limitations of a single platform’s functionality or by a lack of integration between all the tools they use to run campaigns and build their membership base. (If you’re interested in how TMC helps members overcome the challenge of tool connectivity, we have a blog post for that, too.)
The culture of experimentation and analysis that TMC fosters pours back into the cooperative. Kate and Peter presented summaries of the projects outlined above during one of TMC’s Community Calls, socializing the insights they gained with other members. The ability to hear from other members about their work and jointly discover best practices is one of the subtle benefits of TMC, with impacts that can ripple out across the progressive movement.
The TMC staffer who worked with EVP on their phone number project, Senior Data Analytics Manager Cormac Martinez del Rio, reflected on how opportunities like Community Calls help close the loop between one organization’s tech project and the wider movement:
“Through collaboration, members are able to solve problems more quickly by not reinventing the wheel.”
In other words, the next time a TMC member runs into a problem with phone number accuracy, their investigation won’t start from scratch, but can build off what EVP and TMC have already worked on together.
Some organizations—like WTPMI—are trying to develop local leaders, better measure engagement, and improve retention over time. Others, like EVP, are working with TMC to build, test, and refine outreach and operational workflows, using each iteration to better understand what works and what doesn’t.
But whether it’s improving voter outreach, streamlining workflows, or helping organizations better understand engagement over time, the focus of TMC’s work is the same: helping movement organizations spend less time navigating technical complexity and more time building relationships, organizing communities, and developing long-term power.
You can learn more about TMC membership here, or submit a membership interest form to connect directly with our team.
