Weekly updates from the Civly team — new features, improvements, and what we shipped.
The candidate-race correction now starts from each county’s own certified result in the previous presidential election — public, pre-election information, the same starting point every serious forecast uses — and the AI engine measures the shift from there. Re-scored on the same 234-county, three-state test, the average county error fell from 7.6 points to 1.7. See the updated numbers →
Synthetic Polling has graduated from research study to core product — you’ll now find it under Product in the site menu. And it goes well past predicting a race: the same engine now measures which messages move your voters, and turns every poll into a ranked contact list. See the live Kansas results →
The Donor Dossier got a ground-up redesign — a cleaner, six-section format that gives you a far richer, better-organized picture of who a donor is and how they give.
We’ve added California “behested payment” filings to our research data — a layer of influence and relationship data that standard contribution records miss.
Our YouTube controversy analysis can now examine what’s on screen, not just what’s said — a deeper read on the moments that matter in a clip.
A batch of accuracy improvements across donor profiles and contribution data, so what you see reflects reality more precisely.
Plus a couple of improvements to keep reports running smoothly and client documents clean.
We published an interactive research page showing how Synthetic Polling stacks up against reality — predicted vs. certified 2024 results across North Carolina, Florida, and Pennsylvania, plus all six Florida ballot measures, county by county, with the full methodology and sources. Explore the study →
A real district-level poll can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take weeks — so most campaigns only ever test one or two questions. Synthetic Polling gives you predicted answers to the same kinds of questions in hours, for a fraction of the cost, so you can test twenty message variations instead of one. It’s built to complement traditional polling, not replace it — for asking more questions, faster, than a real poll can affordably cover.
The mobile experience got a ground-up redesign — a cleaner, dark, phone-first layout built for the people doing the work from their phone. The tools you reach for in the field are now one tap away.
Full North Carolina support is live for door-knocking teams — voter file, voter history, and address data all in place — and multi-state teams can now move between turf without leaving the page.
Donor research gains a new signal and more complete profiles this week, plus faster state campaign-finance data that keeps itself current.
Big Book research now reaches into audio and video and pulls from a wave of new public registries, so more of who a subject is surfaces automatically.
A batch of accuracy and speed improvements across the platform.
The Civly app is on TestFlight for internal testers — the first time the platform exists outside the browser. Up to 100 team members can install it directly to their phone, with new builds available within minutes of upload. Pointed at the dev backend.
State donor lookups that used to spin for 30+ seconds before timing out are now milliseconds. The 40-state contribution view has been rewritten as a pre-computed snapshot, with name and city normalization done upfront and indexed for direct lookup.
Every state professional license we can get is being loaded into one queryable table inside Civly. First wave: 13 datasets across IL, CO, CT, TX, and NY — about 9.9M rows covering doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, real estate agents, appraisers, engineers, notaries, cosmetologists, and more.
Last release was the safety and accuracy pass. This release, YouTube controversy capture runs as a fully automated background job, dispatched from Big Book as part of subject research.
The public calculator was timing out on giant committees. Bernie 2020, for example, has ~65,000 disbursement rows that each require an AI classification call — the 60-second request limit was killing the job before the math finished.
When Apollo (our second-pass verification source) returns a better signal days after the initial enrichment, the donor’s phone confidence tier now updates in place automatically — no need to re-run a paid lookup. A one-time backfill moved existing donors up tiers from the latest Apollo data across the full enriched-donor table, no extra cost.
A new public tool that shows campaigns exactly how much they could have saved on their last race. Drop in your committee — or any competitor’s — and in seconds you’ll see every disbursement broken down by category, the biggest line items in each bucket, and a dollar figure on the spend that could have moved to a more cost-effective vendor.
The data view that powers donor prospecting now merges FEC contributions directly into the unified donor profile. A donor who gave $50K to federal committees and $30K to state PACs no longer shows up as two separate records — their federal and state giving histories link to the same person automatically, with committee names attached.
Custom Video produces campaign-ready opposition and contrast videos. It scans public footage — legislative sessions, county and school board meetings, candidate podcast appearances, YouTube content — for the moments that actually move a race: contradictions, gaffes, on-record positions a candidate can be held to, off-message remarks. What used to take an opposition research team months of manual review arrives in days as finished clips, ready to put in front of voters.
This release is a top-to-bottom pass on what makes it into the final cut. An attack clip is worthless — or worse, a liability — if the quote was misheard, the context is wrong, or the claim doesn’t hold up. Every guardrail below exists so the clips we surface are ones a campaign can actually run, without a retraction or a self-inflicted news cycle.
Instead of sending one template and guessing what worked, nine email variants now go out at the same time with different messaging angles and asks. Opens, clicks, and replies attach to specific copy choices instead of being averaged across a single send.
Civly builds and trains its own AI models, purpose-built for campaign finance and donor research. Every record the platform processes makes the next model better, and we can tune for the places generic AI struggles — donor name disambiguation, employer shorthand, sparse research snippets. Three new fine-tuned models shipped to production this week.
Cardinal v1 — Donor city correction
Cardinal rewrites misspelled, abbreviated, and typo’d donor cities to the canonical spelling — automatically every Monday, across all 33 state campaign-finance datasets and the unified donor view. Handles more regional variants and edge cases as volume grows.
Codex v1 — Employer & occupation classifier
Codex auto-tags employer and occupation on campaign finance receipts across our state rotation, with new coverage for Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Michigan. Tuned on the abbreviations and shorthand that show up on real filings, and sharper with every new state we add.
Recon v1 — Contact extraction
Recon pulls phone numbers, emails, and addresses out of research documents. Trained to refuse rather than guess on ambiguous matches — closing a failure mode where generic AI confidently attaches the wrong person’s contact info to a donor profile.
A wave of reliability work so multiple opposition research reports can run side-by-side without delays, restarts, or silent failures.
The doorstep canvassing app gained a full voter-registration workflow, advance-ballot follow-up, a redesigned turf interface, and the foundations to roll out beyond Kansas.
Register voters at the door
Map and turf workflow
Beyond Kansas
New phone-quality signals layered on top of the existing carrier check.
Email verification has been replaced with a faster, more reliable backend that sidesteps the SMTP traps that used to hang verification calls.
Donors that show up under multiple variants — different employers, addresses, name spellings — now roll up into a single profile so your list isn’t cluttered with duplicates.
The 8 AM email is now organized around what you actually track, with broader source coverage and smarter handling of quiet days.
A wave of improvements to make precinct picking, route planning, and door knocking faster, plus a sixth state online.
The biggest single-week expansion of Big Book research coverage we’ve shipped, plus a dedicated pipeline for surfacing deleted tweets.
Bigger context, a redesigned video studio, and quality-of-life improvements across the Command Center.
End-to-end AI video creation for campaign attack and promo spots is now live in the War Room, replacing the old drawer UI with a dedicated Video tab.
The FOIA experience is now a two-panel resizable layout with a chat assistant on the left and a jurisdiction sidebar on the right, replacing the old tabbed view.
A major expansion of Fundraising covering donor deduplication, contribution limits, one-click giving, and compliance.
Big Book gains a new consumer-complaints data source, deterministic quality safeguards on Short Books, and chat-driven editing from Helios.
Charitable giving now shows up alongside political giving on every donor profile.
The largest single-release data expansion to date, covering nonprofit filings, consumer complaints, and three new jurisdictions of campaign finance.
Opposition research reports now draw from eight additional public record databases, with a new verification engine that flags unsupported claims and broken links before delivery.
A third meeting minutes data source is now live alongside Legistar and Municode, expanding municipal coverage with automated weekly collection.
The Command Center now connects directly to 17+ live data sources. Ask questions in plain English and get verified answers with charts, tables, and citations — no file uploads required.
Research reports are no longer read-only. You can now edit any section directly in a rich text editor before exporting.
Search across 10 million federal court opinion clusters in one place, with filters for court, judge, and keywords.
We expanded meeting minutes coverage from 13 to 93 municipalities, pulling from three data sources: Legistar, Municode Meetings, and CivicClerk.
Opposition research reports now generate faster and pull from more sources.
Comprehensive federal judge research available across the platform, built on one of the largest legal datasets we’ve integrated.
AI-powered scraping and analysis of local government meetings, surfacing relevant policy decisions and public comments. Currently covering 13 municipalities with 5,000+ meetings, 189,000 agenda items, and 7,300 public statements parsed.
Look up elected officials’ personal financial disclosure filings at the state level, starting with North Carolina.
More than doubled coverage with full search, filters, and an AI research assistant for each. Total state campaign finance database now includes 12.9 million contribution records and 2.7 million expenditure records.
Prospecting is now real-time instead of batch. Results appear instantly as you search.
Text message outreach with AI-personalized messages, local area code sending, TCPA compliance, and CRM integration. Work is underway.
The opposition research report now pulls from significantly more sources and delivers deeper insights.
A built-in calling tool for donor outreach.
New capabilities layered onto the CRM.
Expanded from 9 states to 15 with full ETL, API, AI chat, and frontend for each.
Building on the unified profile with additional data and state-level records.
Find mailing addresses and phone numbers for donors at scale.
A brand new contact management system right inside Civly. No more switching to HubSpot or spreadsheets.
One tool to search and analyze social media across Facebook, Truth Social, YouTube, and more.
A unified profile pulling together state and federal records:
The individual chatbots from across the platform are now consolidated into a single help button on the side of the screen. One chat widget, available from any page, that adjusts to where you are and what you need help with.
Map political networks, flag controversial content, and generate professional reports in minutes.