Solidarity Tech: The Platform Powering Zohran Mamdani's Movement [Updated with latest data]
A conversation with Ivan Pardo, the founder of Solidarity Tech, on how a platform built for "deep organizing" of workers building unions is being used to take power in New York City.
It wasn’t just “cute videos” that got Zohran Mamdani to where he is today. There are many stories to be told about how he and a small but highly dedicated group of supporters organized their way to City Hall, including:
Being able to take advantage of New York City’s robust public financing system, which matches small donations 8-to-1 (and which is one of the most important and least-heralded impacts of the state’s progressive Working Families Party) was hugely important—especially given the huge sums donated by billionaires and mega-millionaires to his opponents. (More on what that means for the future of the Democratic establishment here from Nathan Newman.)
Having a base in the city’s rambunctious Democratic Socialists of America chapter, which had already built experience running and electing candidates to lower office, and which was roughly 10,000-strong by the time Mamdani sought its endorsement, was also vital. (More on that here from Michael Thomas Carter, a DSA organizer who was AOC’s second campaign staffer.)
Being able to connect personally with the city’s one million Muslim residents, who usually get short shrift from citywide candidates, mattered — as did Mamdani’s relationships in the South Asian community and his work with embattled taxi drivers.
Building a culture of connection between local volunteers, canvassers and voters – rather than the culture of extraction that drives most Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts – surely mattered. (More on that here from nia t. evans who reports on the dozens of volunteers “staging hosts” who let the Mamdani campaign run field operations from their living rooms.)
And articulating a politics of joy uplifting the dreams of all New Yorkers, and doing so in the face of Trumpist cruelty and Cuomo-esque bullying and fearmongering — that surely also mattered.
The final numbers on the general election aren’t public yet, but we already know how much organized people power mattered in the primary. More than 50,000 people volunteered on Mamdani’s behalf during the primary, with 30,000 working as canvassers, knocking doors or phonebanking, according to Tascha Van Auken, his field director. They knocked doors 1.6 million times, leading to 247,000 conversations with voters—about half the number that voted for him in June. Van Auken told Peter Sterne of City & State that internally the campaign had more than 400 field leads, volunteers who got additional training and then took a lot of responsibility for directing more than 3,000 canvasses across the city. More than 2.3 million calls were made over the course of the primary, according to Theodore Hamm, the author of the book Run Zohran Run. Between 6:00 and 9:00pm Monday night, volunteers made 251,000 phone calls, according to the phone bank captains running the Zoom I attended. With more than 90,000 volunteers working for Mamdani for the general election, we can be sure that ultimately the campaign reached even more people this fall than last spring.
UPDATE: On election night, Van Auken told the crowd gathered to celebrate Mamdani’s victory that a whopping 104,000 volunteers had made more than 4.4 million calls heading into the general election, and that sometime midday Tuesday a volunteer had knocked on their three-millionth door. An astounding 6,568 people signed up on the spot to volunteer with the campaign when asked by a canvasser. Another 8,389 did so when asked by a phonebanker, she noted. “We love our numbers, we love our metrics,” she told the delighted crowd. But then she made clear that the Mamdani campaign thinks about its volunteers very differently than your typical Democratic election campaign.
“Every number is an act of bravery,” she said. “Every doorknock and every phonecall is a statement of belief that politics belong to all of us.” She specifically highlighted the more than 700 volunteers who “stepped into leadership” and got trained to be field leads, who were given the responsibility to run weekly local canvasses and welcome new volunteers to the campaign. Some, she said, had been doing so since last December. “This is going to transform our city,” she said, of the campaign’s volunteer army. “It doesn’t stop tonight.”
The Tech Behind the Campaign
One of the less-heralded stories of Mamdani’s rise is how his campaign used technology originally built to help organize rideshare workers – a notably difficult-to-organize constituency – to power his anti-establishment campaign. But figuring out how to reel in thousands of disparate individuals and then turn them into a persuasion-and-mobilization machine is a problem that wildfire grassroots campaigns have always struggled with. So while we don’t have the whole story yet, here’s a bit more to help understand the emerging picture.
Monday, I had a chance to chat with Ivan Pardo, the 38-year-old founder and sole proprietor of Solidarity Tech, whose platform serves as the main technology backbone for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. As you’ll learn from our conversation, Solidarity Tech is only now starting to be used by electoral campaigns. And it’s cheap – even with a recent price hike it’s a bargain compared to most campaign tools. Pardo was a union organizer with a tech background when he started building tools to support an effort he was part of in Los Angeles to organize rideshare drivers. After some initial success there, other unions started adopting his tool. The Workers Lab put in a $150,000 to assist with its development. And then the Mamdani campaign came knocking. Solidarity Tech was also the tech engine behind the recent victory of Catherine Connolly in her bid to become Ireland’s President, and it’s being used by Avi Lewis in his bid to lead Canada’s New Democratic Party. For all that, Pardo tells me it’s still a very small company—just him, an engineer and a designer.
MS: It’s really nice to meet you. I would love to hear more about the role of Solidarity Tech in the election. I have a few questions, but, I’d be happy get your overall elevator pitch first.
Ivan Pardo: Solidarity Tech came out of my work eight years ago co-founding Rideshare Drivers United Los Angeles. I didn’t set out to build a constituent relationship management (CRM) system. I set out to build a rideshare worker union. I started going to the airport parking lot, talking with workers, and ran into a tech problem that the off-the-shelf tech wasn’t really addressing. It was costing us something like 10 cents a text when I knew that Twilio charged less than a penny. So I built a little tool to send texts at cost. And then I went back to doing organizing work as a volunteer. A few months later, I built another little tool so we could survey and ranked-choice poll our contact list and link that information to the person we were texting. Fast forward a few years, we started winning and passed a law called AB 5 that gave drivers the rights of employees. And at that point, some unions started reaching out to see if they could use what we were using. So I started thinking about turning it into a product, which we launched last year, March 2024.
Considering the origins of the product, Solidarity Tech is really good for doing deep organizing at scale. There are 600,000 ride share workers in the state of California and we started off with no staff, just volunteers, and then a bunch of other volunteer driver/organizers who we found along the way. We needed a way to put tools into the hands of workers to allow them to build their own unions -- not letting people fall through the cracks, and allowing the relationships that we’re building with people to be stronger than what you could traditionally do over email. Ideally text and phone act as a bridge to an in-person relationship, and then you develop people’s commitment through in-person meetings,
Tasha Van Auken, who’s the field director for the Mamdani campaign, before they launched it, she came across Solidarity Tech through a friend. And we talked and given Zohran’s rideshare work with the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which is our closest ally, and knowing of his candidacy, I thought, this is great. We’ve never before worked with a political candidate. But I said, let’s do it. So I’ve worked closely with them since, with the campaign, since they launched. That’s an overview of how it came to be.
MS: Yes, The New York Times did a very nice story back in 2019 (gift link) that described how Rideshare Drivers United “appears to have outpaced its predecessors by deploying an app that enables organizers to contact drivers as seamlessly as if they shared a water cooler.” Since it was nearly impossible to talk to rideshare drivers at a common workplace, the tech played a match-making role. Uber and Lyft drivers would hear about the effort somewhere on Facebook and then, after being prompted to share information on their availability for a short phone call, they’d be assigned to an organizer who would call them. After each call, the organizer would sort the driver into one of several categories based on their receptivity to taking action, and the person who made the initial call would become the new member’s dedicated contact. Such fine-grained information came in regular use as the fledgling union regularly called on members to show up for highly visible and timely protest actions.
How is the Mamdani campaign using solidarity tech? I was astounded to learn last week that they’re managing something like 90,000 volunteers on a backbone of just a few dozen paid field staff.
IP: They’re using it essentially for organizing their army of volunteers. If you go to the field office, you’ll seeing everybody’s screen having their Solidarity Tech text inbox open. That’s where the field teams are spending a lot of their day. There’s been a lot of attention on how they’ve used social media, making catchy little videos that captured a lot of attention. But what happened next is typically, they’d follow it up, say, if it’s on Twitter, the tweet right after it would be a link to the volunteer page. All those pages are hosted on Solidarity Tech. Every session, whether it’s canvassing, phonebanking, or whatever event the campaign is hosting, they capture all the RSVPs through Solidarity Tech. Every form essentially acts as an intake form, getting people into the system. And then we want to, first ensure that people show up for the event that they committed to. So first we send all the reminders that come with all of that.
But then there’s the processes that the app facilitates so the campaign can work to try and get the most out of the existing volunteers. There’s automations via text/email from an initial email with a calendar invite, to text/emails with confirmation links, to aggregated emails/texts reminders with all your shifts during a given period. And then there’s the ability to do smart targeted outreach to past volunteers to get further engaged. And everything is tracked in one place. They’ll be doing the phone banking, the text banking, the volunteers, emailing to volunteers throughout with, you know, with the product, taking attendance of everybody who showed up at events, plus the passive tracking of an influence map of built from referral tracking, knowing who’s bringing who--all of that lives in the product.
So they have this really clear picture of every volunteer’s level of engagement and what they’ve done. And that can inform future asks that they make of those volunteers. All of that lives in the product. Much of the mechanics of how they’ve been engaging volunteers is campaign specific. But the app is designed in such a way that it allows you to figure out that strategy and enact it really well.
MS: How is solidarity tech different from some of the other CRMs that campaigns can use to do the same kind of stuff?
IP: The first thing I’d say is the all-in-one nature of Solidarity Tech. Mobilize, for instance, is the gold standard for Democratic Party events. It’s good for transactional events, if you just have one event and you need to get turnout. But if your hope is to develop deeper relationships with people and not only that, make the events go smoother? Things like phone calling and texting are built into Solidarity Tech. The campaign has a local area code phone number that is the volunteer management line. When I mentioned how campaign staff are on the screen on their computer all day in their office, their text inbox is managing all the incoming calls and texts that come in. That phone number, which the volunteers get to know because that’s where the automated reminders, and all the text banking, and all the individual responses from staff come from-- that’s the phone number that you can text the campaign, and they’ll reach out and they’ll follow up with any questions or whatever you got on the volunteer side. I mentioned that because with Mobilize or some other event tool for managing the volunteer engagement, it’s more transactional. The goal isn’t to build a longstanding relationship.
MS: Well just to push back on that for one tiny second. I totally appreciate that some tools that were originally created to deepen relationship development end up being used in very transactional ways. I’m thinking of Hustle, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. It started out as a tool that solved a problem that Bernie Sanders field organizers were having in Iowa, which was how do you juggle a couple hundred volunteers that you’re responsible for? Since so many of those relationships happen through text messaging, Hustle started as a dashboard for a field organizer to manage those relationships in an ongoing way and to make it easier for them do so faster, and somewhat more automated. And along the way, people discovered that organizers were having, a higher productivity rate with their volunteers if they were using Hustle. But as soon as campaigns figured out that you could use Hustle for mass texting, they turned it into a tool for mass texting, which everybody hates. So I don’t know whether this is more about the culture of the campaigns that decide to use Solidarity Tech, choosing to use it to continue to manage relationships with volunteers, and to do so in a way that is at human scale. It’s not as if the technology itself guarantees that the human scale approach will be sustained.
IP: Right, and they still use Scale to Win to do their texting to voters. And you can just replace that with Hustle or Get Through, which are similar. And I think that there’s still a place for that. That’s not exactly what Solidarity Tech is for. It’s not really for voter outreach, although some campaigns, such as the Connelly campaign in Ireland, did use it for that. It’s more for the people that you want to have more than a transactional relationship with.
Even if we’re looking at using Hustle for just volunteer management, if they stuck to the original case, they would have the ability to text people and get answers to whether they’re going to come to an event. But Hustle lives in isolation. It has to be synced to the rest of the tech stack, whatever you’re using, and there’s a lot of data loss that happens there. For instance, if you’re using Salesforce, or if you’re using any CRM and you’re doing your texting on Hustle, they’re just disconnected. If somebody has access to Salesforce, they’re not going to be able to see a text conversation with the contact, unless they open up Hustle too. And then, if that person RSVPed via an event page on Mobilize, that’s also going to be disconnected. So now you’re using three tools, and a user of the campaign’s tech is going to need three different logins, and they’re going to need to have three different windows open, and that’s just with those three parts of the campaign.
Campaigns have been doing this for a decade--gluing together seven or eight different tools and making it work. But it’s not clean or easy for the campaign staff to use. It’s not easy to have everything in one place so they can query it. We could do a query that showed everybody who’s texted us in the last you week who has attended, historically, two or more events since the campaign started. Know who that includes, you could create a phone bank and invite them to do XYZ, and then have a team member manage that list. Having everything in one place, I think, opens up a lot of opportunities that you otherwise wouldn’t really think of.
MS: You mentioned earlier that one of the things that Solidarity Tech also enables is for the field organizers to see an “influence map.” Can you unpack that a little bit? What is that and how are they operationalizing that?
IP: I don’t know if they’ve had specific events for people who have recruited a lot of others. Essentially with all the pages hosted on Solidarity Tech being linked with all of your texting and the calling and emailing--every link that the campaign sends out to a contact in the system is going to personalize the link in such a way that creates a token that logs them in and makes it so they don’t have to redundantly give us their phone number again or whatever. And so it logs people in immediately, and then, critically, also includes a referral code so that if they share it, we’re going know who it is that invited them, who referred them to that page.
So then we can see through being embedded in the product, we are passively building up a map of who has a lot of influence, who are the organic leaders in the community who surface, not by us asking them to do anything, but by their just naturally completing a form and then saying, ‘Oh, I’m going to invite my three friends to do this’ and then seeing that they actually complete that action. In the back end, there’s going to be different charts to allow you to see who’s bringing in the most people. It’s not gamifying. We’re not trying to tell you, hey, be the biggest influencer or whatever. It’s just simply for the organizers behind the scenes to understand what’s going on and how far the links and referrals are traveling.
MS: Wow, that’s very sophisticated. One of the big trends of the last couple of cycles in organizing and technology has been the idea of relational organizing. That is instead of asking your supporters and volunteers to show up to help reach voters who are strangers to them by knocking on doors or phonebanking people they don’t know, you ask people to tap their own contact lists. The theory being that in a very noisy environment, the people you can have the greatest influence on are the people who already know you and trust you. Is the Mamdani campaign using that as part of using Solidarity Tech?
IP: They’re using it passively in the way that I described it, with referral tracking and stuff. They are also still using Reach [a relational organizing tool] – they are friend textbanking via Reach, and have had a few events on that. That is not yet a part of Solidarity Tech. Remember the origin of the product—it was built more for union organizing than electoral stuff. There’s probably a place for Reach in union organizing, too, but it’s just not as big as in electoral stuff.
MS: How does Solidarity Tech relate to the voter file? I think what we might call mainstream Democratic Party tech-driven electoral organizing is all built around this mythical, wonderful thing called the voter file. I’ve written about and other people have written about whether this is really as valuable as people think, but at least in theory, if you’ve ever done any kind of canvassing and you’re using a tool like Minivan, you’re seeing as just a normal civilian the power of the voter file. You can see some information about the person whose door you’re knocking on, and maybe there’s even some history there that’s relevant in terms of their past voter history and so on. Obviously Solidarity Tech is not part of that ecosystem. Do you interrelate with the voter file? I went looking at the Mamdani campaign’s expenditures and it doesn’t look like they’re using NGP VAN. So what are they doing? Or what are you doing helping them do vis-a-vis the voter file?
IP: I actually did just a canvas yesterday for the first time for the campaign. They’re using Minivan for the canvassing. We don’t have a door knocking tool yet.
MS: They are paying the NY State Democratic Party for access to the voter file.
IP: We actually have a Votebuilder [a tool for cutting turf for canvassing] sync underway right now, but the campaign’s just been doing that manually. They are lucky to have a lot of great volunteers and staff with technical abilities. There’s been all kinds of tools built on top of Solidarity Tech. There’s a series of host tools for people running the campaigns to be able to take attendance. And then there’s allocator tools -- if you saw the map that they built to get people to pick a neighborhood that they want to canvas in, but not pick the day – that feeds into this allocator system, which is built on Solidarity Tech, that figures out where the high priority neighborhoods are and where we need to get people who have said, ‘I can canvas anywhere in Brooklyn.’ So they’re intelligently allocating people to the right place. That’s a tool built on Solidarity Tech that the campaign built on their own. On the voter record side, they’re just syncing back and forth through. But I don’t know the specific details about what they’re syncing into VAN. Deeper integration with the voter file and a canvassing tool [like Minivan] are the two biggest priorities that we have for the next six months.
MS: One of my hobby horses has always been the degree to which technology either centralizes or decentralizes power. And what I’ve seen over more than 20 years of tech development in relation to political organizing is how much it is built around the needs of either the organizational managers or the campaign managers. Individual volunteer activists, who in some cases can be very rooted in their community and have a big and valuable network of their own, don’t necessarily get anything from being sucked into and managed through these tools. It’s a bit of a philosophical question, but in the case of the Mamdani campaign, being able to convert the individual energies of 90,000 volunteers into a substantial organizing muscle is very impressive. But does Solidarity Tech give something to the volunteer or to the local grassroots organization that may get swept up into something citywide, as what we’re seeing now, so that next month they have a bigger contact list too? The mass list that the Mamdani campaign is building here is really something important and could be quite valuable to them once he’s trying to govern. One of the really interesting questions going forward will be how they do that. Most of the time, people get elected and then everybody in their campaign organization gets laid off. And all that data sits on a computer somewhere, but they don’t do much with any of it.
IP: Yes, like, famously, the 2008 Organizing for Obama effort, and how they triumphed and then shut it down. Honestly, I’ve kind of been worried about that happening again. I think that it’s not going to happen. But my gut is saying that they’re they know very well that it’s a problem, and in order to win free childcare, fast and free busses, and all the things that the campaign is promising they’re going to need to keep a mobilized base. And also maybe that NYC DSA isn’t sufficient. There’s a whole lot of communities that this campaign activated that NYC DSA in my understanding has had trouble breaking through to. And it’s really important to keep them involved.
After we finish talking, I’m going to the Taxi Workers Alliance. Through my work with the Rideshare Drivers Alliance, they are our closest ally in the country. And I imagine you saw over the weekend how Mamdani went to campaign with the taxi workers. I just saw a message from Biju Mathew, who’s one of the founders of the Taxi Workers Alliance, expressing the joy of all of the drivers who were in that and their involvement with the hunger strikes. The Taxi Workers Alliance base is very activated here, and that’s something that the New York City DSA has just never been able to do. NYC DSA has done all kinds of amazing shit, but I think that they are just a part of the list that the Mamdani campaign has been able to build that needs to be kept up. My hope is that there’s a big plan that I don’t know all the details of, but my gut says there’s something coming.
I'm old enough to remember Obamas team spouting numbers about contacts etc that could never ever be independently checked or verified 😎
Really excellent newsletter, Micah (shared with a number of people). Also, found your question towards the end relating to the 2008 Organizing effort for Obama effort a great one, since that whole episode still makes me angry as it was such a waste of voter enthusiasm. Doesn't sound like Mamdani will make that same mistake - TBD.