EveryAction Acquires Mobilize
Today, EveryAction announced its acquisition of a Higher Ground Labs portfolio company, Mobilize. This combination represents one of the larger deals in political and nonprofit tech and ensures the permanent and robust presence of one of the progressive movement’s most impactful technological innovations. Mobilize and HGL have been in lock step since inception — we have served as Mobilize’s first investor, Series A Lead, sole external Board Member, and largest shareholder.
We are incredibly proud that Mobilize has landed with such undeniable impact while also providing financial returns to everyone involved. We believe both are essential to sustain innovation in political technology. In keeping with our mission, we intend to apply the basis and some of the gains in Mobilize towards forward investing in our ecosystem.
Good Progressive Tech is Indispensable
In the four years since its inception, Mobilize has become the de-facto digital organizing hub for the Democratic party and an army of accompanying nonprofits. Founded by Alfred Johnson and Allen Kramer on the promise to support modern digital organizing, Mobilize was quickly embraced by a movement previously reliant on spare index cards and rogue excel sheets to track and mobilize its most valuable asset: its volunteers.
2020 placed all of us into a fully virtual campaign environment. Progressive organizing had to be largely digital, entirely distributed, and flexible. Much of this fell onto the shoulders of Mobilize, which helped organizations tightly choreograph their volunteers to help focus voter contact and drive-in part secured vote differences in hyper-competitive states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia.
Mobilize was mission-critical to almost every Democratic campaign and cause in the country this cycle. At the same time, Mobilize took lessons learned in politics and applied them to their work with nonprofits, labor unions, and advocacy groups.
Since 2016, Mobilize has powered the work of over 3,000 campaigns, advocacy organizations, labor unions, and nonprofits. Over 4 million volunteers have used Mobilize to sign up for over 13 million volunteer shifts. Events like phonebanks, text banks, canvasses, barnstorms, postcard parties and debate watches were centralized and organized in one place — Mobilize.
Accelerator Investing Creates Lasting Infrastructure
Higher Ground Labs’ core mission is to support companies like Mobilize. Companies that solve a demonstrated need in the progressive ecosystem with smart, user-friendly tech that can scale party-wide and that can operate outside of the cyclical boom-bust nature of politics. From the days preceding their formal incorporation, when Allen and Alfred were considering a SuperPAC instead of a startup, all the way through a lead Series A investment and acquisition, Higher Ground Labs has tirelessly championed this important work as the earliest and largest investor, every step of the way
We are happy to see Mobilize find a new home at EveryAction, a company that understands the importance of long term, well-capitalized progressive technology. Now, as an independent business unit inside EveryAction, Mobilize’s core team of 36 employees — and 3,000 causes and 4,000,000 volunteers — will continue to do the work that was so critical in the electoral gains of the last four years and extend the product to many more progressive causes and nonprofits.
Together, EveryAction and Mobilize will continue building the technology that runs our movement — that makes it easy to campaign, organize, volunteer, and win.
Read more about the acquisition in Bloomberg’s exclusive from Joshua Green
