To move people up the ladder of civic engagement, our movement needs technology that effectively reaches voters and other residents, tracks their involvement, and analyzes the results. Currently, each individual organization across our collaborative manages their own database giving us no way to integrate our data. After more than a year in research and development, this year we will launch our Partner Portal with the intended outcome of seeing the full spectrum of impact of our work across the collaborative, and where opportunities lie to learn more about Oaklanders and keep them moving up the ladder.

The root of successful organizing is building and managing relationships — having a shared database will help us to match, connect and grow our relationships across our collaborative to win campaigns that improve the quality of life of Oakland’s low-income, immigrant, and communities of color. The Partner Portal will increase of impact of our organizing as we will be able to consistently and efficiently track current relationships and build upon them, rather than starting from close to scratch with our outreach on each new campaign.

We are currently testing the beta version of the Partner Portal, and are in the process of gaining access to our partners’ databases. We expect to complete this step over the next two months so that we can begin using the Portal. We look forward to seeing how the Portal better informs our organizing as it allows us to see where members across the collaborative are located, to map views of voter file, and to overlay census data to identify where low-propensity voters live.