We are thrilled to announce the five exceptional individuals selected for Higher Ground Institute’s Media Innovation Fellowship: Laura Liibbe, Andrew Markoff, Steven McAlpine, Jesse Thomas, and Liz Utrup.

These fellows are creating products and programs that can transform the way progressive campaigns and organizations approach our new media ecosystem. From improving our ability to manipulate existing social media platforms to developing more sophisticated measurements for influencer programs, their projects illustrate the opportunity of this moment.

Today’s media landscape is rapidly shifting and the progressive movement must evolve with it. The 2024 election cycle made clear that even record-breaking ad spend was no match for the decentralized, creator-driven, and often closed networks and information environments where voters actually spend their time. As audiences fragment across platforms and trust in institutions declines, we need new infrastructure, tools, and strategies to engage the public in more meaningful, resonant ways. We need to evolve our campaign playbook.

That’s why we launched the Higher Ground Institute Media Innovation Fellowship: a new program to catalyze breakthrough projects at the intersection of political engagement and media. This three-month intensive program provides a $15,000 grant, strategic coaching, showcase opportunities, and a community of practice to leaders advancing new models of progressive media.

Just 1.5 months ago, we put out an RFP to the community and were blown away by the response. We received over 100 proposals, reflecting an ecosystem bursting with creativity, urgency, and readiness to push progress and try new approaches—if resourced. Most of the applicants, including our fellows, are utilizing generative AI to build progressive media infrastructure, demonstrating the immense potential of AI and our community’s focus on leveraging emerging tech to drive the field forward. Media innovators are emphasizing culture as core infrastructure, offering strategies rooted in storytelling, identity, and creator ecosystems. From gamified civic apps to WhatsApp-based outreach and smarter media planning strategies, this process showed a movement brimming with innovators rethinking how to mobilize, organize, and persuade.

Our Media Innovation Fellows stand at the forefront of this shift, ready to build critical components of the new campaign playbook we need to meet the moment. Over the next three months, our fellows will work on their projects with support from the Higher Ground community and a cohort of other fellows. The program will culminate in a showcase that we hope you will attend.

We are excited and proud to introduce them to you.

The Media Innovation Fellows

	Laura Liibbe The Fellow: Laura Liibbe is a media strategist and product leader with 15+ years of experience reaching immigrant communities. At Noticias Para Inmigrantes, she scales progressive media products, leads audience research, and experiments with platforms like WhatsApp to build trusted, multilingual content that informs and empowers Latino immigrants. The Project: Trusted Messaging: Strengthening Community & Civic Participation Through WhatsApp with Noticias Para Inmigrantes. Laura and her team are creating a playbook for progressive media to use WhatsApp Channels as high-trust infrastructure to engage Latino and immigrant audiences, build trust and affinity, and test scalable models for civic information, activation, and revenue.
	Andrew Markoff The Fellow: Andrew Markoff built the analytics engine that powered the Biden and Harris campaigns’ paid media strategy—the most expansive and expensive political ad effort in American history. He has served as a campaign manager and senior strategist for candidates nationwide, leading teams to victory in competitive races from school boards to governors’ offices and Congress. The Project: M3 Media. A cross-channel media planning platform that optimizes campaign budgets and buying decisions to efficiently reach and persuade the voters the left needs to win.
	Steven McAlpine The Fellow: Steven McAlpine, co-founder and CEO of INTRVL, is a “40 under 40” recognized leader in pioneering measurement and optimization techniques for digital media campaigns designed to influence public opinion. Prior to INTRVL, he led audience targeting and measurement at Hawkfish and media analytics initiatives for Fortune 500 marketers like Johnson & Johnson, Macy’s, and Dick’s. The Project: Audience Profiling for Creator Programs with INTRVL. He is building audience profiling capabilities that help organizations working with creators better understand which audiences are being reached and how they engage with content. These capabilities will provide insights into audience attitudes and electoral participation, enabling more strategic programming decisions.
	Jesse Thomas The Fellow: Jesse Thomas is a pioneering social impact strategist. An Obama For America-trained organizer, marketer, and technologist, Jesse has led strategic impact and mobilization efforts for some of the nation’s largest political campaigns, nonprofits, and mission-driven brands. The Project: Activating Live Audiences: Performance Marketing for Social Impact with The Civics Center. This project explores how nonprofits and movements can leverage commercial performance marketing techniques from the live-streaming content industry on YouTube, Twitch, and Kick. The project tests new ways to drive measurable social actions—like voter registration—through sustained sponsorships with livestream creators and their communities.
	Liz Utrup The Fellow: Liz Utrup started in politics on President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. She has since amassed extensive communications and operations experience across political campaigns, government, issue advocacy, and paid media. Liz is currently Managing Director at A|L Media, where she directs account services for paid media campaigns on behalf of Democratic candidates and causes across the country. The Project: The Real People Project. The Real People Project is a voter research initiative that uses online ethnography to gain a deeper understanding of voters’ social media engagement. The project’s goal is to gain insights into informative and persuasive digital content to help shape more effective communication strategies.

What’s next?

We’re thrilled to support these five extraordinary leaders as they develop innovative solutions to the most urgent challenges in political and civic media. Stay tuned for project updates, insights, and learnings from the field.

Reach out to institute@highergroundlabs.com if you want to get in touch with the fellows. To follow along the journey, subscribe to our newsletter and connect with us on LinkedIn.

Higher Ground Institute (HGI) is a strategic innovation engine for the left, on a mission to test and scale new approaches to organizing and digital infrastructure.