The Murmuration Effect: Why the Future of Social Change Depends on Communities

Denver: Welcome to The Business of Giving, Emma.

Emma: Thank you so much for having me.

“So at our core, we exist to provide tools and data and insights to community-based organizations all across the country so that they can achieve their goals, so that they can help to uplift the voices of people in their community and ultimately fix the many systems that are failing people across the country.”

Denver: Emma, the name Murmuration, boy, that’s striking, that’s unique. How did you choose it, and what does it reflect about your organization’s vision?

Emma: Sure. So at our core, we exist to provide tools and data and insights to community-based organizations all across the country so that they can achieve their goals, so that they can help to uplift the voices of people in their community and ultimately fix the many systems that are failing people across the country.

Each of them is unique. Each of them has to do their own work. But imagining what it would be like if organizations all across the country were all driving together towards some common shared goals, that’s the image of a murmuration in the sky. Each bird is an individual, but each influences the group around it, and those influence the group around them, and so on.

And it moves as one, one big mass of individuals. So that’s why we’re named Murmuration.

Denver: You gave that a lot of thought. It was wonderful thought, and it says a lot about the organization. Now, you pivoted from traditional philanthropy… you were at the Robinhood Foundation, and you did that to launch a civic tech nonprofit in 2014. What gap did you see that sparked this shift?

Emma: So I loved my time at Robinhood. I was there for seven years. Incredible place. Really getting to be in the trenches with people who are dedicating their lives to trying to break the cycle of poverty here in New York City. The limitation that I felt on an ongoing basis year after year was that with direct service philanthropy, we were solving problems for people in crisis today, which is hugely important.

But we weren’t able to think about how to stop people tomorrow having the same crisis. There’s these systems that are influenced by government, by larger sums of money that come through federal, state, and local funds. And by any number of other policy choices that are made, those systems create the crises, and those systems can also be used to create the solutions.

So I was lucky enough while at Robinhood to get to do a little bit of work around policy and advocacy, a little bit of work around some parent and community organizing, and really start to see the value of creating demand for change and of elevating the voices of those people who are both closest to the problems and closest to the solutions.

Some of that work I had to do more nights and weekends because it was outside of the scope of New York City and it was outside the scope of more traditional poverty fighting and direct service philanthropy. And the gap that I saw that was surprising to me, as someone who had worked on political campaigns in the past, was that these organizations did not have access to tools and data to do their work.

They were using, in some cases, yellow legal notepads. In other cases, Excel spreadsheets or Google Docs, similar for tracking their conversations with people, which is great for keeping a list, but not so great if you want to be able to draw connections between people, if you want to talk to the same person over and over again, if you want to be able to collaborate with another organization and share conversations that you’re having that are similar.

So I started to dig in on why that gap existed, and it existed for a number of reasons. One, most of the tech and data that is out there for use in things like organizing is political in nature and is partisan in nature. And so for organizations that are trying to do work that is nonpartisan, for organizations that are saying, “I actually don’t care if the people in my community are red or blue or purple or any other color, I just want to know what they think, and I want to be able to bring them together to do this kind of work.” Those organizations were sort of out of luck.

The other piece is these kinds of organizations tend not to be funded to do… Yeah, it’s just sort of access, technology, and data, right? Funders fund the direct service piece. They fund what they can see, the conversation that you’re having, not the tool that you’re using to track it. They don’t want to know that their check is going to fill-in-the-blank system that is behind the scenes; they want to fund what’s on the other side. So I have a lot of thoughts on why philanthropists, going forward, really need to be thinking much more about that core infrastructure that is required to do the work, but it was a gap that I saw.

Denver: Yeah. Yeah.

Emma: And the third was a skills-based gap. These are volunteer organizers in many cases, not data managers. And so understanding those gaps, it seemed like there should be a relatively easy solution. At the time, we didn’t build anything. My background was in medieval literature and strategy work, not in building SaaS products.

And so I thought, what if we could take off the shelf products? There were any number of small startups that could be used as sort of civic engagement CRMs. What if we could get our hands on some data and have a data scientist or two who could tune it to that kind of local context? And then just provide it as a common good to those organizations that needed it, and learn over time what more they needed from the tools, what more they needed from the data, and so on and so forth.

So that’s how that came to be.

Denver: Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, too many funders still see those tools as overhead, and they are anything other than that. They’re levers that allow everyone to do their work efficiently.

Let’s talk about campaigns and elections because unlike most civic techs’ focus on elections, Murmuration targets change between them. Speak about prioritizing this long game of community power.

Emma: Yeah. Look, some of the partners that we work with in election years do work that is targeted to a specific race and a specific outcome. They have (c)(4) organizations. They are organizing people around a candidate in particular who they think really represents their community.

And that is important because they’re helping to shape who is making the ultimate decisions on how resources are spent in their community. But in order to bring people together around that candidate or around that race, or even around that policy issue that’s being voted on, or whatever is currently being talked about in your local state house or at your city hall, you have to have deep relationships within the community.

And that’s the work that often gets underinvested in. People like to invest in things that have a clear outcome. There is an election day; someone wins or loses. Or there is the day the bill is being voted on; it passes or it’s doesn’t. You know it’s binary. You either won or you lost, and you can tick in either column.

Ongoing organizing work, ongoing power building, ongoing relationship building, that’s the core civic fabric of this country, really. I mean, so much of what makes communities strong is that connection where people are coming together around common problems, around common solutions, around a common desire to see their community truly thrive.

That’s the ongoing organizing work that has to happen to make those elections even matter, right? And to ultimately have a truly participatory democracy, to ultimately have the kind of social fabric that I think we believe in in this country, we just too often are willing to sacrifice because it’s harder to measure. It is time- intensive, it is resource-intensive, and you’re never done.

Denver: You’re never done. That’s right. But by the same token, sustainable civic impact happens in the off years. That’s when it occurs.

Emma: Yes, it does.

Denver: Yeah. Yeah. Now, Emma, you started with K through 12 education, but you expanded to housing and health and climate justice. What made this holistic approach essential?

Emma: So we started in education for two primary reasons. First and foremost, we believe deeply and still do today that one of the primary levers to unlocking opportunity, both for individuals and for communities, is access to a high-quality education. It’s how you can break generational cycles of poverty. It’s how you can really allow people to live their freest and healthiest and most dignified lives.

We continue to do lots of work in public K-12 and believe deeply in that ongoing work, but we also know that it’s not enough. And so we took a step back and said, Look, the core of what we’ve built is infrastructure for civic engagement. That’s what our tools are designed for. That’s what our data’s around. That is what all the insights that we glean through our research are centered on.

It’s: How do people feel? How do they think? How do they want to show up? What do they need? That’s not about any one issue. That’s about how people are showing up in communities. And so we are, I would say on some level, agnostic about the issues that people in communities want to prioritize in any given moment and the solutions that they want to see.

We have clear guiding principles for our work, clear standards around ultimately treating everybody with dignity, as long as that is at the top of your list for how you are approaching the goals that you’re setting for your community. If this year you want to prioritize housing, and next year you want to be prioritizing climate because that’s what you’re feeling, I’m not going to tell you in New York that what you are feeling is wrong, because I believe you should prioritize climate first and then housing.

That’s ultimately denying you your own agency and suggesting that my lived experience in New York is what should dictate how everyone else across the country feels.

Denver: Yeah. I had a great experience when I was younger, when I was working on a program and I went into a community and tried to really bolster some of the challenges that they faced. And a guy says to me, he says, “Why don’t you come in here and try to work on the things that we’re really good at and not try to fix us?”

Because often, when you try to work on the things you’re really good at, it’s almost like fertilizer on a lawn, which will kill the dandelions instead of picking out the dandelions. Because if you pick out the dandelions, the dandelions are coming back. And so sometimes we try to listen to their voice, but we listen to their voice after we tell them what they’re going to do, and then we ask for their opinion.

Let’s talk a little bit about those tools: Organizer, Atlas, Explorer. What they do is help empower neighbors to drive change at the block level. Give listeners a little bit of a feel of what they are and how they work.

Emma: Absolutely. So Organizer is our core product. It is our civic engagement CRM. It is what community-based organizations across the country use to manage their community. Think about it as the system that they can use for phone calls and emails and organizing events. And door knocking is something lots of them do, right?

Actually being able to think about how to cut turf and say to a group of volunteers, “These are the doors you’re not going to knock on. These are the doors I’m going to knock on. These are the kinds of questions we’re going to answer. And by the way, this is also where those answers will be stored, so that next time when we want to organize a rally, we can go back in and say, ‘Well, here are the hundred people we spoke to last week. These are the 25 who said they’d be really interested; let’s call them.’” 

Helps them to do their work much more effectively. And it’s very much designed around the kinds of actions that community-based organizations need to take in order to build communities one individual at a time. 

Organizer sits on top of Atlas, which is our enhanced data set.  Atlas combines the best of multiple voter files and a number of other data sets that are both public or that we pay for. And then our data science team does an incredible amount of work, and our data management team as well does an incredible amount of work to tune that file to local context.

So much of what’s out there in terms of commercially available data is designed to be impactful for those who can afford to pay for it. So that’s big national companies, national campaigns, and similar. That is not: How can I understand who’s likely to turn out in an off-cycle local race? Or how can I understand who in my community is likely to volunteer? Like then one of the scores that our team has built is a volunteer score because all of these organizations are looking for people to show up.

If you are going to call people to try to build a base of volunteers, wouldn’t it be better to call a bunch of people who have a proclivity for that kind of work? So we really think about in Atlas: What is it that people doing the work of community organizing need to understand about the individuals in their community in order to help to elevate their voices and drive power?

Explorer is our beta product and is much more about understanding communities holistically versus at the individual level. So you wouldn’t use Explorer to find 10 individuals who are likely to volunteer. You would use Explorer to look at your community overall and have a sense of: On any number of indicators, where is it… you can sort of define your own versions of success… but where am I seeing pockets of volunteerism? Or how does my community compare to the one down the street in terms of the likelihood to participate in local elections, or the likelihood to engage in grassroots work?

And so it’s much more around thinking about as an audience or as a use case the executive director of a multi-site organization, or a philanthropist who is investing in multiple communities: How can I compare those communities and understand at a community-wide level demographic breakdowns, yes, but also, how that community feels about any number of issues and how it’s doing along any number of indicators in terms of the health of that community?

“We do four things. We build a network. We build and provide that network with access to best-in-class tools. We build and provide that network with access to data-driven insights. And then we also provide supports and strategic services to those organizations to help really amplify the impact of their work.”

Denver: It’s so refreshing to hear of tools being created for the audience that is intended to use them. I think even in the nonprofit sector, we get corporate tools, and they twist them into a pretzel and then try to sell them to nonprofits, and it just doesn’t work. And it would even be more dramatic at the community level if we try to make those tools be efficient for what we want to do.

The organization’s mission requires balance to financial sustainability with independence from partisanship or corporate influence as you’ve so clearly stated. How do you strategically diversify funding and revenue streams, Emma, to maintain that autonomy while scaling impact?

Emma: Yes, so in some rooms with nonprofits, the conversations around, or the use of the phrase: P&L statement, is somewhat frowned upon, but we actually think about them.

We do four things. We build a network. We build and provide that network with access to best-in-class tools. We build and provide that network with access to data-driven insights. And then we also provide supports and strategic services to those organizations to help really amplify the impact of their work. I think about each of those as having its own P&L in some way, like: How much does it cost us to add another user to the platform?

We do actually charge all of our partners to use our tools. We set our pricing based on legal requirements, and then also on really making sure that we are not perpetuating the hierarchies that we think exist– that you were touching on in your question around who can access these things. So we keep our pricing as low as we possibly can, and we try to set up our team, set up the way we approach our work in ways that allow us to scale without breaking the bank, if that makes sense.

At our core though, across all of that, there is what I think of as sort of the core infrastructure that makes this possible. So one of the reasons that you may have seen any number of what I would call political or civic engagement tech companies go out of business over the last decade is that they have a great idea, they build a great product, they’re able to raise a bunch of money upfront, and then if what they’re trying to do is work in local communities, if they’re a smaller organization, they can’t charge those organizations enough to be able to continue to invest back in the product.

 So one of the reasons that we’re set up as a nonprofit, and one of the reasons that general operating funds are so important to us is that we have this base of core infrastructure that is philanthropically funded, that allows us to continue to invest in making those tools better and making that data better, and to your point, making them more and more responsive to the needs of organizations in those communities, not responsive to the needs of those who can most likely pay for it, if that makes sense.

Denver: That makes sense. Solid business model. You are set up as a nonprofit, but you do operate as two entities. You have a 501(c)(3) research institute and a 501(c)(4) for direct support to community organizations. Tell us a little bit about that and how these distinct roles complement one another to amplify civic engagement.

Emma: So in our (c)(3), that’s where we do all of the work that enables us to ultimately build the tools and data that our (c)(4) then provides access to organizations across the country. So we think about this as very much non-partisan, nonprofit sort of ( c)(3) eligible work that is researching: What do communities actually need? What are people feeling? What are they thinking? What are community-based organizations bumping up against?

It’s all of what you might think of as the design work to make sure that in the end when we build something, it is responsive to the needs of those organizations. That is actually the vast majority of the work that we do. Our (c)(4) then has access to those three products, actually owns those three products, that are built and informed by the  (c)(3) work, but ultimately are built and owned by  our  (c)(4). And the (c)(4) then licenses them to other nonprofits for use in communities.

We do it that way because some of the organizations that we license to are  (c)(4)s.

Denver: Yeah.

Emma: Some are (c)(3)s. We don’t want to have to… and some, by the way, many community-based organizations have both. And so the idea that we would have, the (c)(3) arm of a community-based organization licensing tools from a (c)(3), and the (c)(4) arm licensing from a (c)(4), it just got too cumbersome for the organizations, let alone for us.

And so to be able to be much cleaner about that, we do all of our research in the research institute, and we provide access to the tools and data through our (c)(4). It’s just, frankly, it’s a cleaner business model. It’s safer for us from a compliance standpoint. And also, it allows us to really invest in community-based organizations, regardless of how they have decided to set themselves up.

Denver: Got it. I’m curious, Emma, how does the organization balance supporting grassroots organizations, their unique priorities, with aligning them toward broader systemic change without top-down control?

Emma: So I believe deeply in the power of communities to shape their own destiny. I actually don’t think that the work of community organizing… I’m sure there are examples, but for the most part, what I see is not organizing for the sake of organizing. It’s organizing because a system is failing that community and needs to change, right? There is a common goal that people are coming together around.

And so I think there’s less of a need for us or anyone else to come in and say, Oh, actually you need to be thinking longer term here because people do think long term. They are trying to change things that seem ultimately intractable. They may along the way have, and in fact often do and really should have, shorter term impact goals that seem more achievable than that long term systems change, which might somehow, sometimes seem very far out of reach.

But again, for the most part, I don’t really worry that they are just looking for incremental change and that’s it. It’s just that incremental change added up over time gets you to systems change.

Denver: You’ve been doing this for about, well, since 2014. How has community organizing changed over the past decade amid rising polarization, and how have you guys adapted to stay effective?

Emma: Yeah. So I’ll answer that question in two ways. I think first, one clear way that it’s changed, I remember that first week of lockdown during COVID when our partners called and said, “What do we do about the fact that so much of our work is in person, and no one is allowed to leave the house? How do we think about staying engaged with our community? How do we think about continuing to build relationships with our community without that in-person, face-to-face connection?”

And in many ways, that’s what our tools are set up to help them to do. Door knocking wasn’t something that people were doing during that period, but the ability to still talk to people, to reach them through other methods, whether that was phone, whether that was email, whether that was text, to think about bringing people together in virtual spaces, that I think was not something that many of the organizations we worked with were thinking about before COVID.

And they had to embrace it during COVID. Most of them have gone back certainly to including in-person components in their work, but almost all have kept an electronic or sort of tech-enabled component to that, which it turns out actually is often very helpful when you have people who can’t make certain times or need to stay home with their children, or it helped to open the door to a broader set of people to be able to interact.

 You mentioned specifically polarization. Certainly as a nation, we have become more polarized over the last 10 years. I think polarization is not new. It just seems heightened at this point. Some of that is that we’re just bombarded with it every day. Some of that is that it truly is a rending of the fabric of this country. And that’s really where I come back to: why we do the work we do; why we believe so deeply in the organizations we partner with.

Because when you are having a conversation about what your neighborhood needs, it’s really hard to be polarized. You all walk the same street, you shop in the same stores, your kids go to the same schools. There’s enough common ground that you can have conversation. The higher up you get in altitude, the more you’re sort of just talking broad swaths about policy at a federal level. And the more you’re doing that from the safety of your own room and online, the easier it is to continue that polarization. 

And so I think the more we can be thinking about having conversations at a local level, the more you can think about bringing groups of people together in physical spaces, in communities. We all do actually have more in common than not, and there is real opportunity to at least deescalate. We’re never going to all agree on everything, but you can deescalate and de-risk some of what I think we see as a nation in terms of the polarization problem when you are having those kinds of local conversations.

Denver: Yeah. You got a real problem in front of you: you want some clean water, you want to solve it, and your political party doesn’t make much difference. Speaking about adaptation, younger generations are reshaping civic engagement. Share a few thoughts on what you’ve observed about Gen Z.

Emma: So we have spent the last couple years researching Gen Z. We started down that path because so many of the organizations we work with were asking us questions. We keep reading about Gen Z. What does this mean for our work? We see and hear that they are different. How should we, as community-based organizations, be thinking about bringing them in? And what is it that they want out of civic engagement?

I think our research reports are all available on our website, murmuration.org. I would encourage people to read them if you want to see sort of the full breadth of the study. But when it comes to civic engagement, Gen Z actually does really want to participate, but their participation can look quite different.

They’re not as likely to strongly affiliate with a party. They’re much more likely to strongly affiliate with what they see as authentic voices, with issues that resonate to them, with opportunities that allow them to feel like they’re part of a community. So there’s a hunger and an appetite to be more engaged.

It just doesn’t look exactly the same as what we thought of as engagement 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or 30 years ago.

Denver: Given your mission’s demands, Emma, what core values keep your team resilient when tackling some of these difficult and contentious issues? In other words, your culture.

Emma: So as an organization, there are a few sort of tenets that guide our work. We take the long view. To your point about needing to really think long term in order to achieve the kind of change that we are trying to achieve, we have to think outside of the traditional cycle of one year, or in politics, of two years. We really have to take a long view.

We only succeed when our partners succeed. So it is not enough to sign up a bunch of new organizations to our platform. If they are not actually having more impact in their community, we’re not successful.

We are constant learners. So when I first founded the organization, the way I phrased this was aggressive humility. The problems are such that we have to be aggressive about it. We have to sort of do everything that we can to try to support these organizations in doing their work, in leveraging the power of civic engagement, and we can never be confident that we have all of the answers.

 We tend to hire people who are really curious, who want to learn from our partners, who want to support the evolution of our tools and our data through input from communities, and who acknowledge that in spite of the fact that they are incredibly smart and incredibly talented, they may not have all of the answers.

And then “stronger together” is our last, and that is really about all of us as a team. So much of our work is cross-functional. Our engineers, in partnership with our product team, build in partnership with our data management team, build in partnership with our data science team. None of that becomes available to our partners without our partnerships team and so on. No one team in our organization can have the kind of impact that we are trying collectively to have, and so we have to be stronger together.

But then also to the point about we only succeed when our partners succeed, we have to be thinking about what it looks like to bring organizations together. And then I would say finally, we know that we alone can’t solve the problem of civic engagement in this country. And so we are constantly looking for partners, whether those are research partners in academia and beyond, whether those are other tech partners that we can collaborate with funders and similar.

We’re not going to solve the problem of the degradation of the civic fabric of this country on our own.

Denver: Yeah.

Emma: And so unless we can be thinking about how we fit into a much broader ecosystem, we’re never going to truly be successful.

“…I really hope that it becomes the norm that there is this deep connection between big philanthropy, big business, and community-based power, that you have to be able to connect all of those dots. It cannot just be that the loudest voice in the room always wins. It cannot always be that the organization with the most money wins. Each community has the right to help to shape its own destiny. All of us have the right to be able to truly live our freest and healthiest and most dignified life.”

Denver: Well said. Finally, Emma, we’ll take a long view here. Looking 25 years ahead, how do you think the relationship between traditional philanthropy and grassroots power will evolve? And what assumptions about doing good today will seem outdated or even quaint by 2050?

Emma: The luxury of being able to look that far ahead! What a question! Look, we started this conversation talking a little bit about the need for philanthropists to invest in infrastructure and to really be thinking about what is it that community-based organizations need, that grassroots organizations need. I think part of what I hope to see over the next 5, 10, 15, you know, 35 years, is that ongoing understanding that it is not enough to come at problems top down.

You have to come at them… certainly there’s space for top-down, but also bottom-up. That unless there is demand for the change that you are trying to implement, and unless you’re actually listening to what communities need, the solutions you may be trying to bring in over the top are either going to be rejected or are fundamentally not going to be addressing the real core problems that that community feels.

I think there’s also this opportunity people talk a lot about– trying to elevate the voices of those closest to the problem. We try to talk about elevating the voices of those closest to the problem and the solution because in many cases, they have great ideas.

And fundamentally, even if they are looking for–to the point about stronger together– for lots of people to come together and help problem solve, if you understand the problem, you can also better understand the potential of solutions. And so unless philanthropists are really bringing some of that into their work, we will continue to perpetuate some of the top-down kind of feel that I think we see.

So my hope is that we end up with a future where not just grassroots work, but civic engagement and civic fabric, even investment in physical civic infrastructure… not just what we do, which is with the technical civic infrastructure… but shared spaces in communities, reinvestment in libraries, reinvestment in rotary, reinvestment in the kinds of buildings that once upon a time brought everyone together.

Because I do believe that is what can set us up for these kinds of deeper conversations, the de-escalation of some of the polarization that we’ve seen, and ultimately greater systems change. I also have to hold out hope some of the systems that the organizations that we currently work with that are at this moment in time failing us, will no longer be failing us.

That may uncover a whole bunch of other problems that have to be solved. We may look back on a time when, say, oh, when the biggest problem we had was public K-12 education. I mean, it is a behemoth of a problem, but if we’ve solved that, I’m sure we’ll uncover others. And so maybe that will seem quaint some number of years from now.

For the most part though, I really hope that it becomes the norm that there is this deep connection between big philanthropy, big business, and community-based power, that you have to be able to connect all of those dots. It cannot just be that the loudest voice in the room always wins. It cannot always be that the organization with the most money wins.

Each community has the right to help to shape its own destiny. All of us have the right to be able to truly live our freest and healthiest and most dignified life. And we need to be able to do that in community with others. We need to be able to do that in partnership with others. And so the more philanthropy can be thinking about that social fabric, I think the more likely we are to ultimately live up to the promise of America.

Denver: Absolutely. And it also addresses another issue that we have right now, which is loneliness. Getting these communities together and people working together on common problems is exactly what was needed right now.

For listeners inspired to learn more about Murmuration or financially support this work, tell us about your website, Emma, and the kind of information they’ll find there.

Emma: Our website is murmuration.org. That’s M-U-R-M-U-R-A-T-I-O-N dot org. I know it’s a mouthful. We’d love for you to go and take a look. There is a lot more information there about our tools and our data, but also lots of case studies about the incredible organizations that we work with, many of whom would love your support as well.

And so hopefully, you find inspiration at a local level, as well as get a bigger picture for, a better picture for what civic infrastructure can look like and how it can help to unlock the promise of America.

Denver: Fantastic. Well, I thank you so much for being here today, Emma. It was a real delight to have you on the show.

Emma: Thank you so much for having me.