With 2024 around the corner, Higher Ground Labs’ Progressive AI Lab has awarded 14 incubation grants to organizations and individuals innovating with generative AI. The Progressive AI Lab is the hub for AI innovation within the Democratic and progressive landscape for the upcoming election cycle — and these grant recipients are integral players in this work.
We are laser-focused on solutions that leverage generative AI to run better campaigns and elect Democrats in 2024. Generative AI can augment the capacity of our people, saving precious staff and volunteer time by automating mundane tasks, analyzing disparate data into actionable insights, and optimizing our tactics. Our inaugural grant recipients are at the forefront of this critical innovation.
In total, we received 140+ unique responses to our RFP from across the progressive ecosystem. We heard from individuals, nonprofits, technology companies, state parties, PACs, and agencies. Their proposals sought to address current inefficiencies across every vertical of modern campaigns — from revolutionizing opposition research to turbocharging video creation to democratizing data analytics. Some applications featured standalone products that could be implemented by campaigns at scale, while others proposed to incorporate AI solutions internally within their organizations. Overall, the diversity in proposals and creativity captured across the proposals demonstrates the tremendous potential for generative AI innovation across the progressive tech landscape. We are so grateful to everyone who applied and excited about the work moving forward.
What’s next? Each grant recipient will receive $20,000 to develop a formal proposal and proof of concept for their idea by February. The next steps for these grant recipients include a plan to deploy their solutions during the 2024 cycle. After submitting these proposals, a subset of our inaugural grant recipients will be eligible for further funding to develop their MVP. HGL looks forward to continuing support of the grant recipients through AI expertise, product coaching, strategic introductions, and investment.
Across core categories of campaigning, recipients of the Progressive AI Lab’s inaugural grants include:
Content Creation & Advertising
538Design.AI is the design solution for Democratic campaigns. Their affordable AI designer is accessible around the clock, allowing campaigns to swiftly generate superior assets, regardless of their design expertise.
BattlegroundAI is the first AI-powered political advertising platform for progressives. Safely and easily create and launch customized, high-performing political ads for your campaign, candidate, or cause. Developed by two advertising industry veterans, Maya Hutchinson and Henry Cyranka.
Jumpstart AI provides simple tools and a managed service to make video creation simple and affordable for organizations of all sizes.
Winnable is a website builder leveraging the power of AI to create and test high-quality content for downballot campaigns and causes. For only $50/month, campaigns and causes can build and launch a high-quality website in minutes.
Data & Analytics
The Movement Cooperative supports movement-building organizations by providing data, technological services, and developing deeper understanding through shared learning and collective action. They will extend this work into the world of AI and Machine Learning by closely collaborating with their member organizations to explore how these techniques can improve identity resolution algorithms, classification systems, and research efforts.
Fundraising
Blue Raven Labs is developing CallSmart AI, a groundbreaking tool that streamlines donor engagement and management. This AI-driven software creates personalized fundraising call sheets, summarizes conversations with donors, and drafts follow-up messages.
Research & Polling
Change Research was founded to challenge the status quo, making public opinion research faster, more accurate and affordable. Magnify AI Targeting draws on a survey database of 250M+ data points, and makes custom voter targeting models accessible to campaigns and organizations without a huge budget.
Hill and State Strategies is a national research and public affairs firm dedicated to advancing progressive democratic organizations. They are building a research AI to meet the burgeoning demands on campaigns and organizations for faster and more efficient research ahead of 2024.
Voter Contact & Organizing
AAPI Victory Alliance builds Asian American and Pacific Islander political power across the country. With language and cultural relevance being key pieces of engaging AAPI communities, they are using AI to enable better voter outreach by expanding their language and messaging abilities.
Colloqium makes software that helps political campaigns manage their relationships with voters, using personalized AI to drive engagement, donations, and turnout.
CommonGround is augmenting voter outreach through proprietary LLMs that create hyper-personalized, knowledge-grounded dialogues tailored to individual voter interests. The platform includes highly customized real-time talking points, one-button text and email, candidate voicemail creation, and issue research.
Daisychain is an organizing platform that helps Democratic campaigns effectively engage voters, donors, and volunteers. Their latest AI-powered feature parses incoming text messages from voters, and suggests the correct response – saving staff and volunteers countless hours that can be used on other campaign tasks.
About HGL’s Progressive AI Lab:
Our mission is to foster innovation, elevate research, and coordinate strategic priorities and best practices in the realm of AI for politics. Join HGL’s email list and follow us on LinkedIn to learn more.
