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Blog

A Look Back: New Product Updates in Quorum in 2022

Jonathan Marks (00:20):

All right. Hi, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Jonathan Marks and I am Quorum’s co-founder and CTO. And I am thrilled to get to talk with you all today about some of the exciting changes and developments in our product that you’ve seen over the last year. And talk about a couple of the things that you might see in the coming months. Just as I start a couple of housekeeping items. First I like when I have a very you know, very conversational kind of presentation with you all. You know, as you have questions or comments or suggestions or anything during this presentation, please, please feel free to put it into the chat or pose a question in the Q and A section of the Hubilo platform and I will happily answer those either as we are going or at the end because we’ll have some time for Q and A.

Jonathan Marks (01:24):

And then if you’re not currently a customer and you’re interested in getting a full demo of any of our products at the end of this session you can do that on quorum.us, our website. You can fill out a form to see exactly what times are available. So that’s really easy. And then if you’re a current Quorum user and you want to learn more about products that you already have access to or an additional module that you don’t have today you can email your CSM to learn more about that. I was introducing myself again for those that have joined the presentation since I just started. My name’s Jonathan Marks. I am the co-founder and CTO here at Quorum. I oversee a lot of things that we do here.

Jonathan Marks (02:12):

So I am directly responsible for our engineering, product, and information security teams as well as our editorial team which collects all of the contact information for the 500,000 individuals that we track. As part of Quorum, you might meet me in a lot of different ways. I really get a lot of benefit out of interacting with our customers and learning from the things that they do and you know, the positive things and the negative things and the opportunities and the challenges that they have interacting with our products and using our tools. And so you might meet me in an executive business review where I joined from time to time with, with customers that have, you know, either particular product feedback, things that we want to share with you. I also schedule a whole series of different product feedback sessions with lots of different users and customers, and that’s a big part of what makes my job really fun, but also makes my teams able to help and serve you better.

Jonathan Marks (03:14):

I am based here in Boulder, Colorado. Many folks on, on the Quorum side are, are living the remote life. If any of you quorum folks are Quorum users out here in the mountain west drop me a line cuz I’d love to say hi. So what I wanted to do before I get into kind of what’s happened and what changes have happened over the last 12 months I wanted to give a brief overview of what it is that we actually do. This slide here is something that I’m sure many of you have seen before, but we came up with this because it really helps describe the value that we are trying to provide to our customers, which is that when I started the company nine years ago there wasn’t a single tool that customers could use in order to run the day to day operations of every different part of their, of their government affairs teams.

Jonathan Marks (04:09):

When we started the company, if you wanted to track state legislation or communicate with staffers on Capitol Hill or track the meetings that you had or send emails or launch grassroots campaigns or do research on a host of different things, or try and kind of run your function in a coordinated fashion, you couldn’t just use one tool you had to use, you know, the worst I’ve ever seen is 17. I had a customer at one point take me to a whiteboard and draw out for me exactly how the 17 different pieces of software that they were using all connected to one another and kind of the jury-rigging that they’d had to do to make that happen. And the goal of Quorum as a business is to provide all of that different functionality all in one system so that whether you’re doing and we think about this as kind of four main functions that we support regardless of which domain you’re doing it whether you are kind of starting and figuring out what your world looks like, you’re mapping your environment or your policy landscape trying to understand perhaps which legislators at the federal, state, local or international level might care about your issues or which legislative trends might impact you in a coming state session.

Jonathan Marks (05:24):

Or which local municipalities are talking about your issues in their agendas or which you know, which press reporters have spoken about your topics in the past and might be the right people to reach out to, to try and drive engagement or, or interest in your issues. Whether you’re tracking, keeping track of all of this legislation, regulation, what members of Congress are saying in committee hearings, what state legislators are saying, what’s going on in the Twitter conversation in one of the 30 different countries that we cover. Whether you’re trying to change what’s happening in your policy landscape, either by running a grassroots campaign and having your donors or your employees or your volunteers or your customers try and message a member of Congress to say, Hey, this is something you should care about. Or comment on a particular regulation, or do a campaign, or, you know, whatever, or whether you’re trying to run your PAC.

Jonathan Marks (06:21):

And give money to candidates to try and encourage them to focus on your issues and think about them. And, you know, have the opportunity to bring, you know, drive, increase the attention of the things that matter to you while doing that in a compliant, structured way. Or whether you want to try and, you know, drive press engagement just through our communications product of telling reporters, this is us. This is what we care about, you know, this is why you should write about our issues. We have one system to do that all. And then finally bringing it back around of reporting and understanding which PAC should you actually be giving to through our through all of our kind of donor analysis functionality or, or what states actually pass the legislation that you focus, that you were focusing on, or which of your emails are getting the most engagement, or, you know, pulling this all into a single dashboard in a single place.

Jonathan Marks (07:08):

That’s really our goal as a business, is to provide this all together in one system so that you don’t have to do the work to connect all these different tools. And the other thing that I wanted to mention is that from the very beginning, the reason our products are what they are is due to customer feedback. It’s due to people like you saying to me or my team over and over again for years, do this, don’t do this. This is great. Do more here, expand here. And I now run a 140-person team that is solely focused on doing all of the things that our customers are asking us to do. And that is you know, completely due to our customer support over the years. And I can’t thank you all enough for the, you know, suggestions and recommendations and everything else, because it makes a huge difference in the quality of the products that we provide to you.

Jonathan Marks (08:03):

So here’s a little bit about our agenda for today that we are going to be covering. My goal is to cover a lot of the things that are new and exciting in our products over the last year and then talk a little bit about what’s gonna be happening in the future. Though though there’s a lot of opportunity there, particularly following the doubling in scale of our R and D teams last month following the acquisition of Capital Canary. So lots coming on the new front, but I’m largely here to talk about some of the exciting things that have happened over the last six to 12 months. So the first of these is we launched a new tool for communications. Historically we’ve been well known for our work solely in government affairs of building a really robust stakeholder management and research tool to bring all of the different things that your team might need whether you’re a federal, state, local, internationally focused, grassroots focused, stakeholder engagement focus you know you know, regulatory compliance focused PAC management focused all into one system.

Jonathan Marks (09:12):

But something we heard from many, many customers is that their policy communications teams or just general PR teams that often have to work really closely with the government affairs function didn’t necessarily have a great tool that integrated well with the way that they were talking to the GR team and, and the work that they needed to do. In addition, they, have a lot of the kind of ability to go in and see who are the people that might care about my issue or what is the press, the conversation happening in the news around my topics is something that even if you’re not a PR professional, can be really valuable for government affairs professionals and enable them to do a lot more. And so we brought this product to market and it’s a huge increase to the product.

Jonathan Marks (10:00):

It covers, it added the contact information and the beats that they are focused on and everything else for over 500,000 reporters and outlets and other things around the world. It’s an international level of data and it’s incredibly exciting, the depth and the breadth and the scale that this enables your outreach to, to get to. So thing number one is you’re able to reach all of these reporters and media professionals and expand your network because if there’s somebody that has been writing about something, we know about it. Thing number two is just like with Quorum, how you can use Outbox or other tools to communicate directly with the stakeholders that matter to you, you can do just the same with all of these people. In fact, it’s the exact same product, All of the filtering and reporting and interaction, logging and emailing, and everything else that you’re accustomed to in Quorum, it’s exactly the same, just with a different focus and a different set of people that we’re focused on.

Jonathan Marks (11:02):

And we’ve got a lot, if you’re trying to drive engagement with your issues in a particular area. I’m from Brookfield, Wisconsin. It’s a, they would say a moderately sized town I would say a small town outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And we’ve got the local you know, the local weekly newspaper that I read growing up and the people that work there just like how we have the mayor, right? We have both, you know, we go very, both very low and very big. Thing number three is that you can get real-time alerts on mentions of your organization and your issues across—and the numbers here are scary, hundreds of millions of news articles. We are pulling in live coverage from over 75,000 different outlets globally and giving, sending those alerts to you in real-time if you want that on the reporting front—all of the reporting tools, the dashboards, the sheets, the search visualizations and reporting functionality, it’s all the same.

Jonathan Marks (12:04):

We know how to use it in Quorum. You’ll know how to use it here and it’ll enable your teams to build a single dashboard for both your earned media and your influence-driven media and what you’re doing in the GA function. Keep that all in one place. And then, of course, all of the stakeholder engagement functionality is the same of, of keeping your record of interactions and make, keeping kind of building institutional knowledge about what you’re about, what you’re doing. If there’s one thing here, it’s the same as what you’re used to from a feature perspective, but so much more and provides additional opportunities for your team to drive value from the, you know, the system and the reporting infrastructure that you’re putting into Quorum.

Jonathan Marks (12:44):

Another big, so one of the things that I was talking about on the previous slide was how this is fully integrated into all of our products. And so whether you’re using Quorum Federal, State, and local, Quorum Grassroots, Quorum Stakeholder, it’s all the same. And so the value of being able to kind of pull this all in together into one system is something that we’ve heard from our customers is, is really helping them kind of consolidate their efforts with different folks on their team and, and have a much more coordinated and intentional approach.

Jonathan Marks (13:22):

Another big upgrade that all of you receive, because this is in all of our different products this year, is A/B testing and utbox. One of the things that we like to do here at Quorum is try and drive our market forward and give you all access to tools that didn’t historically exist in the government affairs space. A/B testing is table stakes if you’re talking about building a digital marketing tool or lots of the other functionality that exists for other industries, but there’s nothing, there was nothing like this for the basic, how do we drive better engagement with our emails in the government affairs space? And this is now available for all of you in, in your Quorum accounts because you can build a message and say, all right, I’m trying to drive opens from state staffers or from grassroots advocates or whoever.

Jonathan Marks (14:14):

Let’s try some different subject lines and see who opens that email more and automatically send to the broader group the kind of the best email of the bunch. And then use that to inform our strategy over time. The whole goal here is to drive more engagement with your emails so that your recipients, whether they are in government, your donors, your advocates, your volunteers, your customers, or your employees, you’re able to drive more engagement with what you’re telling in through the exact same system that is where you’re storing their information and organizing all the work that, that you’re doing.

Jonathan Marks (14:54):

Another big update, and this is a little bit of a preface to a bunch of things that you’re gonna be seeing in Quorum over the coming months is that we added federal and state candidate information. The federal level, this is great, right? It’s not, it’s nice to be able to see who are the challengers, who are the people that are, you know, raising money and trying to get into the higher levels of government. But at the state level, it’s really, really hard to keep track of every single person that is running for elected office. And we have tens of thousands of them that we are tracking are now available in the product. It enables you and your teams to track candidates right alongside officials as they’re promoted, or not, into elected seats.

Jonathan Marks (15:43):

All of your interactions and emails and everything else about them will sync ma like completely normally as you would expect into the system. And so you can build your whole history of engagement with these individuals. Something I’ll say here, though, is that this functionality is just the tip of the iceberg of what you should be expecting for the next cycle with respect to what we are going to be able to do from a candidate perspective. Our acquisition of Capital Canary brings really the best in the business of thinking about and building tools for either get-out-the-vote functionality or donor research or being able to kind of rank and analyze and report on how all of these individuals are raising money. How do you drive your advocates to actually register to vote and interact with them, and so on and so forth.

Jonathan Marks (16:34):

And there’s so much opportunity in those tools that as we integrate those into Quorum and bring the data and bring all of the experience that they have, doing that into the same kind of connected system, there’s a lot of opportunities for this to really continue to expand. It’s also something we’re really excited about from a PAC perspective because historically when people have been trying to do, manage their PACs at the state level, they’ve had to go look up this information manually themselves. If they ever wanted to give, for example, to a state challenger and find their ID and everything else, this is gonna allow us to automate a lot of that process. And so it’s something I’m pretty excited about.

Jonathan Marks (17:18):

Another huge improvement to the system is you know, we for a long time have provided transcripts from all 45 committees on Capitol Hill and all of their subcommittees, whenever they are hosting a committee hearing where we go in and use machine learning and fancy technology tools to automatically transcribe what people are saying. Now, that’s a great feature because if your organization or your issue is mentioned by a lawmaker in one of these committee hearings, because we’re doing it live it’s happened, we post those transcripts within an hour of the committee hearing having been completed. You can get that alert in your system practically immediately after that committee hearing ends. And that’s great, but if you wanna then go take this committee hearing and show it to your boss or give it to your board when the machine is translating it from the audio into written language, it’s pretty good.

Jonathan Marks (18:23):

We aim for about 90% of the level of a human transcriber, but it’s not gonna be perfect. And we know that that’s one of the kinds of costs of speed and, and scope because we did, we cover it for everything. But this year we introduced another layer of quality to enable our customers to get the best of both worlds which is we not only get every committee hearing at the federal level within an hour, but we also cover the largest number of any committees where we have a human then go in and correct those transcripts within 24 hours of that committee hearing. Having completed this is something that is a huge benefit to our users because it takes a lot of time to do that really well and as well as identify every single speaker and get the quality of that transcript top notch.

Jonathan Marks (19:14):

But that’s something that we’ve been investing in for our customers because we think it’s really valuable for them, and we do it more than any other provider in the market, both in terms of the speed of our automated transcripts and the scope of our, and, and also the speed, honestly, of our human verified transcripts as well. We’re excited as we continue to get more customer interest in this and in other things to bring this technology to more places. And so if you have, have thoughts on other committees you’d like to have or you know, the particular value you see at the state level or other places please let us know because we’ve built this as a system that can scale out. It’s just a matter of cost for us to scale it out much bigger than it is right now.

Jonathan Marks (20:06):

Another huge improvement is that we use we track agendas and minutes of city council and county commission meetings on an incredibly fast basis. So we do this right now for about 5,000 different places, which means that we cover every single city and county with greater than 10,000 people. And we do that every single day. We’re pulling that information constantly and it’s enabling our customers to do some pretty exciting things with you know, with not only this integrated reporting, but also kind getting knowledge about what’s happening before the fact before it really bubbles up to the state level or the federal level, or before it kind of becomes a local regulation. One of the things that’s exciting that’s coming from our Capitol Canary acquisition is that we’re bringing two of the best providers in the local space together.

Jonathan Marks (21:07):

We have every city and county with greater than 10,000 people. Again, that’s about 5,000 different locations. [Capitol Canary] covers about 9,000 different locations including about 800 school councils and school boards in getting all of the agendas of the school board meetings and everything else. We’re merging those together and bringing kind of the combined coverage to our customers for our local products which is going to be a really substantive offering in this space. And you know, an incredibly integrated experience with the rest of the functionality that we provide. It’s something we’re very excited about.

Jonathan Marks (21:49):

Another area where we are continuing to focus is international which is our coverage of the people and the documents and the press and the tweets and everything else of elected officials around the globe. We currently cover 26 countries in addition to the United States. We added 12 in the last year, and we’re still going. We are seeing a lot of interest from customers in continuing to expand this and starting to add not just who the people are and what those people are saying, but from a legislative and regulatory perspective, what are these people working on? And it’s something that we are continuing to focus on and putting significantly more resources into. And if this is something that is of interest to your team whether it’s adding more countries, or adding additional coverage in certain countries, please let us know because this is something that we are actively investing in and are very excited about continuing to expand.

Jonathan Marks (22:55):

Another new thing that came this year is something that our customers have been asking me for, for years which is, hey, quorum, you guys are really great at providing the software, but I still have to do a lot of work. You know, can you just do it for me? And where we were a couple of years ago was we were too small as a company to be able to kind of build out the infrastructure to be able to do that for our customers, whether that’s running their pack for them, or printing checks, or supporting their grassroots work or you know, doing custom reporting projects or custom development projects for all kinds of different things. We had to say no back in the day because we were too small. And it’s very important to us that whenever we say yes to a customer, we are set up to be able to say yes very well and very thoroughly.

Jonathan Marks (23:45):

Well, now we have an incredibly sophisticated team that is that has been doing managed services work for decades. And we’re rolling this out to all of our customers where we can do the work for you. If you both want the software tool, but you don’t wanna configure it, you don’t wanna set it up, you don’t wanna have to worry about actually entering in all of the PAC receipts, or you don’t wanna worry about like how all of the campaigns are generated for grassroots and you just want to come up with the strategy in partnership with our team, then have us help you implement it. This is a great opportunity for you all and can help to extend the work done by often very small teams. And so if you have a project that you might want us to work on, if you would like to outsource the kind of day-to-day operations of a subset of your government affairs of activities, we’re here to help.

Jonathan Marks (24:42):

And we’re happy to do the heavy lifting for you, right? So there are a lot of updates. This is as I always tell folks this is just the tip of the iceberg of the work that we’re doing. Again, we have you know, well over a hundred folks on our products and engineering teams that are working every day towards improving your products. We add new changes to the system every single day. You don’t see it. We have a system where we upgrade, upgrade your version of the product without you even noticing. But what that means is we are pushing hundreds and thousands of changes and improvements to the system every single month. And so while like these are kind of some big ticket items the feedback that we’re getting from our customers of, Fix this, make this new button, make this make more sense you know, focus on you know, improving the scaling of this particular component, we need to be able to send more emails or handle more advocates or whatever it might be.

Jonathan Marks (25:42):

You know, we’re doing those things every single day. And so what I just highlighted was kind of some of the big tent pole items. But you know, it is thanks to our users that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of smaller things that our team also does over the course of the year to make the experience better because we believe that good products are not just built-in doing big, flashy things. It’s constantly kind of iterating on the core customer experience and investing in the little things that make, make for a really good product. So here are a couple of things that you might be looking forward to coming soon. Which is one we, you might have heard a month ago that we acquired an organization called Capitol Canary.

Jonathan Marks (26:31):

Capitol Canary, formally known as as Phone2Action is the best provider of grassroots advocacy tools in the market. They have the most number of users. They have some really amazing technology. They have some really cool things that we are gonna be bringing to for all of our customers, whether that’s Get Out the Vote Tools better and expanded user interface for advocates live maps during meetings where you get people to text in exactly you know, that text in to take action, you know, and, and show it on a big screen for everyone to see it. There’s a huge opportunity here for our customers in terms of just bringing together the things that both companies have already done. But another example of this is in the legislative tracking space.

Jonathan Marks (27:23):

There are some things that they do that no one else does. I already mentioned the local side, but something, where they have a product that is totally dissimilar to anything else in the marketplace at all, is their donor research tool, which does two big things. One, it’s a really great tool to research you know, which PACs are giving money, who are they giving money to, are they giving money? How are my competitors doing? You know, where are they getting their money from? Is it big? Do donors or small donors, and so on and so forth. That’s really valuable. But also, and this is something I’m exceptionally excited about, they’ve built some technology to match your advocates or your employees or your donors, whoever they might be, to their giving record at the federal and the state level.

Jonathan Marks (28:06):

And so, all of what you’re gonna get when, as we merge this into the core product is that when you’re launching a grassroots campaign, and you want to target advocates who haven’t taken action, but have given a fair amount of money at the state level, and therefore, they obviously care about the political process and might be really good targets to go after, that’s just gonna be one button to click in the product. Similarly, if you’re trying to raise money for your pack, and you see, you can click a button and we’ll tell you who hasn’t given to your pack, but it’s given to other people’s packs again, that’ll show you kind of where there are opportunities for you to continue to grow your donor base or your advocate base or anything else or see which internal employees are the right people to talk to.

Jonathan Marks (28:53):

And it’s a big way of building kind of building networks of engaged individuals within your system. I’m very excited about that. And then contact information. We now have an in-house data provider for all of our contact information, they’re the best in the business, and provide some really awesome functionality to show all that information in Salesforce in a very native way. But also we’re growing our contact database. We have huge opportunities to expand it at a local level, and at the international level to kind of bring all of this functionality together under one roof. That being said, though, the big headliner here is not what are we gonna be able to do with bringing the best features and the best systems from both companies together. It’s about what are we gonna be able to do in the future.

Jonathan Marks (29:41):

Quorum has been a customer-led and product-led company from the very beginning. And with this acquisition, we have doubled the scale of our r and d resources, and we are, and we have not doubled the number of things that we are focusing on. What that means is that there is a significant increase in the number of people and the attention and everything else that is going to you know, improving the products that you all are, you are all using. And so it’s something that we’re, we’re pretty excited about in terms of when this is going to happen. Some of the fast and easier things are happening in the next three to six months, some of the kind of longer term things will happen over the course of the next year or so. But the, again, the big narrative here is how do we take all of these things and make them just as good as humanly possible with a much more established and scaled out team that can do so much more than it ever has been able to do in the past. It’s something I’m exceptionally excited about.

Jonathan Marks (30:44):

And then another thing that you should be aware of is that we’ve made huge strides in our PAC technology. You may be familiar that we acquired the formally known as Cision GR function that provides the most popular PAC management tool in the marketplace. We have that product as one of our products. It’s in-house, it’s fantastic. But it’s not, it’s, you know, it’s older. It is not something that has seen the degree of investment that all of our products have seen over time. And what we’ve been focusing on since that acquisition happened about nine months ago, is building the next-generation PAC product. And we call it Quorum PAC. It’s fully integrated into all of our systems. The same emailing tools, the same website builders, the same reporting tools.

Jonathan Marks (31:35):

The ability to, if your state team is tracking bills and marketing particular legislator targets, you’d be able to see that right? When you’re trying to give them donations, all of the kind of Moneyball campaign finance analysis that I was talking about, it’s all in one product. And we right now are in beta with our Federal PAC version of core technology. And there are some great new features for collecting online contributions of getting of some really awesome new features like text to donate or better reporting to be able to find these people and a new filing interface to reduce the amount of time that it takes you to go through and actually report to the FEC what happened. If you have a federal-only PAC — state PAC support is coming soon—and you’re interested in taking the, taking the dive into using the, you know, best new entrant in 20 years into the PAC market and want to start evaluating and taking a look at this functionality. As I mentioned, it’s in beta. We’ve got some folks using it and it’s something that we would love to talk to you about and see how that could fit into your strategy. So very excited about the PAC side of our business. We’ve got a great team really investing in and working in that part of the system.

Jonathan Marks (32:52):

One other flag that I just wanted to make is we are doing our annual system usability survey which we do on an annual basis. We’re doing a raffle for folks to win some $50 gift cards. And we pore over every single line of text that our customers type into this one. It is, and everything that you send us, it is so valuable for us to get access to kind of firsthand feedback about our products and our systems and how they all work together. And so very excited about this. Please if you have a few minutes to fill it out, we greatly appreciate it. We will use it. We are using last year’s to this day. We have everything categorized and organized and are thinking about exactly how we can take advantage of that feedback as much as humanly possible.

Jonathan Marks (33:49):

Alright, and so that’s all that I had prepared to talk with you all about today. I would now love to take any questions you might have. I can see, one question that was asked. Can I talk about data security as it relates to the PAC product? So Quorum is an organization that is hugely focused on data security. We have a dedicated information security team. We have a SOC II type 2 certification that we are actually going through our yearly audit right now for that evaluates a couple of hundred different pieces of evidence that we have to provide to a third-party auditor for them to basically sign off on all of our security controls and tell us that what we’re doing aligns with best practices. It’s an incredibly in depth and valuable process and it’s something that we focus on hugely internally, that we put resources and effort and time towards.

Jonathan Marks (34:41):

And the PAC product is under the exact same security umbrella as the rest of our products. It uses the same in to kind of infrastructure level, personnel level, to application security level, and all of our policies and everything else. And so that’s something that we would you know, that is very important to us.

Pauline, the download center. So we, the download center is our drag-and-drop interface to be able to generate one-pagers and leave-behinds that you can give to a member of Congress or you know, an executive that’s going to go meet with someone. That’s something that we actually are thinking of putting some effort into soon. Something that the Capitol Canary team has been putting a lot of effort into is what they call impact reports which is taking economic impact data from their customers about where their facilities or their, you know, taxes they pay, or their employees or everything else, and putting it into a really nice pdf.

Jonathan Marks (35:44):

That’s also something you can do with Quorum’s existing technology. But because as we’re bringing this together, that means we’re gonna be investing more in these kinds of features. What I will say is if you’re looking for a particular degree of customizability we do have professional services offering where we can kind of make exactly it is what you want. And so that’s something you can reach out to your CSM about. If you would like, you know, there are kind of two different levels of we can make some kind of stylistic improvements to the existing system, or for some customers, we’ve really just kind of started from scratch and built a thoroughly customized and very specialized kind of template for them that we then fill with all the relevant data that people are looking for. And it can go just as deep as you want it to go. And so so definitely some, some improvements coming to the functionality itself, opportunities to customize it right off the bat both kind of the kind of moderate level customization and kind of the full, the kind full-scale approach if you would like it.

Jonathan Marks (36:52):