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Causes grew to a jawdropping 186 million consumers as one of the first 10 Facebook platform apps. Started by Facebook co-founder Sean Parker, it was meant to turn a generation into activists and donors. Induces acquired Votizen to augment shallow clicktivism with a style to remind friends to election. But after Facebook travelled mobile and the web platform waned, Parker organized Causes’ marketing to his newer civic tech effort Brigade, for which he’d led a $9.3 million Series A and later fed more money. Brigade’s vote guide was used by 250,000 people in the 2016 election leading to 5 million Get Out The Vote contents sent, but the startup’s apps for connecting with campaigns or debating political issues never moved viral like Causes.
Now both Causes’ and Brigade’s tales are coming to an purpose. In February, we caught gust of Brigade selling off its high-grade engineering team to Pinterest in an acquihire while it tried a residence for its IP. Today, Brigade announces its engineering and data have been acquired by politician tracking service Countable. Words of the bargain has still not disclosed but it’s unlikely that Brigade’s Series A investors payed a return.
” While we didn’t reach the ultimate mountaintop, I think we moved the entire civic tech room forward” Brigade CEO Matt Mahan tells me.” Countable offers a unique opportunity to bring greater scale to some of our very best suggestions, and our previous work will in turn speed up their already impressive progress .”
Brigade’s features
Brigade CEO Matt Mahan
Countable lets people view summing-ups of upcoming legislation, contact their representatives about their sentiment, and then way government officials’ elections.” Brigade was founded with the non-partisan mission to reinvent how Americans participate in politics. When they choose to bring their pilgrimage to a close, Matt and Brigade’s leadership team searched out a mission-aligned corporation to acquire their technology, and a responsible home to point any members of their community “whos” eager to remain civically active and engaged” says Countable CEO Bart Myers.” They approached Countable-an obvious fit for our commitment to lowering barriers to civic entry and empowering meaningful activity, and we’re excited to provide a dwelling for their technology moving forward .”
To further their contribution to the democracy innovation community, Countable has agreed to open source Brigade’s voter matching application. This allows apps to tie a user to their official voting record to present personalized features like reminders of upcoming elections, petitions for neighbourhood issues, and ways to contact their elected officials. Seth Flaxman, the CEO of civic tech software developer Democracy Runs that built TurboVote, says” This is extremely difficult technology to build and can help TurboVote determine which of our 6 million consumers necessity more help registering to poll. They are passing the baton, making it possible for nonprofits like ours to build off their progress .”
But there was one more loose end to tie up. Induces had sucked in a ton of Facebook user data in the early days of the platform before limiteds were put in place( too late to stop Cambridge Analytica ). So Mahan tells me” Brigade proactively reached out to Facebook and worked with them and a third-party consultant to conduct a comprehensive evaluation to determine and delete customer data “thats really not” essential for providing the existing app experience. In all, we deleted billions of rows of data that ethically we felt should not be transmitted .”
Countable
We’ll have more analysis shortly
Read more: techcrunch.com
