Celebrating 16 years and looking to the future

Dear Clients and Partners,

April marks 16 years since Catalist was founded and we wanted to take a moment to reflect on how much progress we’ve made — together. We have become so much more than just a voter file vendor: we are partners in an effort to understand the electorate and improve our campaigns from the ground up. We provide data, but we also provide critical support and services to help our clients get everything they can from their data as well as the data we provide. Most importantly, we work in solidarity with our clients, their mission, and their values as we live up to our own values as an organization. As we look forward to another 16 years of partnership and collaboration we want to share where our work is heading, including thoughts from some of our board members.

Catalist was founded as a progressive data utility — one that would operate as a trust with unions, major progressive organizations, and seasoned Democratic campaigners steering the ship. Catalist is organized to work with advocacy organizations and campaigns, but it operates on non-profit principles, striving to maximize services to clients, not profits for shareholders. Workers at Catalist are now part of a union, too — the Communication Workers of America, which has been organizing digital workers in our field — making it the only unionized voter file company.

When Catalist started, campaign data science was in its infancy. Campaign offices were barely starting to use digital files and social media companies were just starting to take off. We’ve repeatedly proven, through rigorous use in campaigns, organizing, and community building that Catalist innovation and research, along with the Catalist file, helps clients improve contact with members, increase vote share, and turn out more voters. Importantly, this experience brings greater efficiency to our operations, helping us do more at lower cost. As data science has advanced and become more accessible to organizations in our ecosystem, Catalist is increasingly focused on collaboration, transparency and portability, all while protecting client data and retaining competitive advantages for our partners.

That work includes:

  • Collaboration on major cell phone acquisitions and modeling updates
  • Live dashboards to identify trends in Voter Registration and Mail Voting
  • Sharing our modeling innovations like Vote Choice History (VCH) since 2014 and Peoria Values Clusters (2017) 
  • Releasing DWID, Catalist’s unique ID, to make matching and collaboration across coalitions easier
  • Publishing Post Election What Happened™ analyses that provide insights into the electorate 

The Catalist file is the longest-running voter file outside the major parties. It was the first outside file to be used by a presidential campaign during Barack Obama’s 2008 run. Today, the Catalist file has grown to 4 billion data points for 256 million unique voting-age individuals. 

Looking ahead, we’ll be doing more to work with pollsters and improve the reliability of public opinion research. We’ll be doing even more to bring impactful and deep collaboration with peer organizations to cell phone acquisition and modeling. And we’ll continue to serve only progressive organizations and Democratic campaigns.

We also wanted to take some time to share reflections on this anniversary from leaders in our community, who have played a major role in shaping Catalist and its work:

"Catalist’s ability to grow, mature, and innovate to help progressives win is a big advantage. Their commitment to our community – and not commercial pursuits – gives us great confidence that they'll be here for the next 16 years."

— Ademola Oyefeso, UFCW

"Staying in touch with our members is one of the most important things any organization needs to do, especially a union. Consistently matching our membership data with Catalist has been so important to our efforts to engage our members, who are on the front line in our communities educating our children, and ensuring that even after they move or change jobs, we can stay in touch. That simply wouldn’t happen without the investment we made as a community in creating our own data utility."

– Karen White, NEA

"We need good data to win and that’s become central to our work over the past 16 years. We’ve gone from cutting turf by hand to running sophisticated campaigns across our field and digital teams. With Catalist, we know that all the work we put into building our ecosystem stays in our ecosystem — so we keep that long-term competitive edge we need to win."

—  Maria Peralta, SEIU

"There aren’t a lot of tech companies from 2006 that are still around, let alone companies working in political data and technology. It is impressive that Catalist has done so much good, for so long."

– Gene Karpinski, LCV

As always, we’re eager to hear from our clients and partners about how we can serve our community. And we’d like to thank you for your collaboration with Catalist. When we work together, we make our data stronger, and we secure the victories for workers, causes, and campaigns that are at the heart of our mission.

We are more committed than ever to your cause, your success, and a strong progressive ecosystem.