Like many of the best things in life, the idea of Murmuration was developed and nurtured through conversations around a small table. In a cozy New York City cafe that let its customers linger for hours while deep in conversation and thought, a vision for what would become Murmuration began

to take shape. Increasingly aware of the gaps in infrastructure faced by organizers and advocates for public K-12 education, Emma Bloomberg, Murmuration’s Founder and CEO, saw the potential for one centralized collective resource to help propel a sector forward, and, with the good counsel of

friends and colleagues, in March of 2014 she quit her job to see if she could bring the idea to life.

Over the course of the next six months, Emma set out to hone her vision for an organization that would provide infrastructure for organizers

and advocates to cultivate bases of voters actively engaged in education issues. She traveled the country speaking to people from organizations small and large to make sure she understood their challenges — and the gaps that she might attempt to fill to support their work.

What those conversations confirmed were critical gaps in data and tools, leaving organizers and advocates without a clear path to effectively mobilize communities in support of a transformed public K-12 education system. And with that,  Murmuration launched — in November of 2014 - as a

bold initiative designed to revolutionize the education advocacy landscape, leveraging data and technology to bring focus, innovation, and collaboration to those fighting for equitable education for every child. At the core of the idea was a belief that all the organizations working to

ensure equitable access to a high quality public K-12 education could be more impactful if they had access to shared tools and data - the ability to do their own work, and enhance the collective at the same time. The name — Murmuration — reflects that belief.

Murmuration doubled in size (from three staff, to six) and hit the ground running with an initial goal of reshaping the way education advocacy campaigns were run. Recognizing the immense potential of data to drive meaningful change, Murmuration started as a 501(c)(4) with an ambitious mission: to equip advocacy groups with cutting-edge tools and data to make their efforts more strategic, informed, and impactful. And our first task was to prove to

anyone that data could inform strategy at a local level.

For that, Murmuration needed a database to store the voter file, and a data scientist to start to tune national data to local context. There was no campaign platform, no web portal, no tool for partners to access — just the raw database, and a small team trying to prove out a concept by meeting partners where they were, and painting a picture — through data — of

where they could be. We knew we wanted to put tools directly in the hands of our community based organizations, but we resisted rushing into development. Instead, we anchored everything in discovery — immersing ourselves in our potential partners' needs and on-the-ground challenges. We placed a heavy focus on listening, learning, and hands-on engagement laying the foundation for what would come next.

Our first  project was to build a predictive model for a local school board race so that organizations working in that district could see if they had been talking to the right people. Put simply, we aimed to answer a critical and complex question for our partners: Who should we mobilize and who should we try to persuade? And the best way to start was to evaluate whether the efforts underway were effectively driving change and making a measurable impact.

By 2016, Murmuration’s partner network included advocates as well as those more focused on elections. We worked with LEE, a longstanding partner of ours, to develop m{insights 1.0 based off the base code of a version of their PinPoint tool. m{insights 1.0 was our

first partner-facing tool, which largely allowed users to map where their members/
supporters were against political districts. We set up a series of pilot projects with partners in California, Texas, Colorado, and New York, ensuring we were able to locate their people in districts

accurately, and equipping them with the data they needed to show elected officials that there were communities of people ready to demand change. And we worked to better understand user stories and develop a vision of what m{insights 2.0 could become.

We learned quickly that tools and data, without training and support, would never fully meet the needs of the sector, and so we began development of a dedicated partner support team - staff whose focus was on ensuring successful implementation of

strategy using our models and m{insights 1.0 and on helping partners keep track of their own first party data. This team experimented with different ways of adding value and building capacity among our growing partner community.

Murmuration’s vision for m{insights 2.0 was a CRM that allowed users to phone bank, text bank, canvass, and more in a single platform - leveraging voter file data augmented to account for local context. We planned to launch m{insights 2.0 in the summer of 2017, but first we had a few

questions to answer: do we build the platform in-house? Or do we find something else out there? The answer was clear — our partners’ needs were evolving, as was our ability to support them, and building anything in-house would limit flexibility as we continued to learn and grow.

So, we partnered with Crowdskout, a nonpartisan political software company, to leverage their technology, integrate it with other third-party tools, and scale it — and we asked some of our partners to graciously test

out the new configuration. We needed to learn what worked and where we were falling short. And while m{Insights 2.0 launched that summer, it evolved for the many years that followed.

Always committed to fostering collaboration and connection, Murmuration began to lean more heavily into connecting partners with each other — officially anointing all partners as part of our network and expanding the ways in which we supported their work

individually and as a collective. We codified our existing partner support efforts into a partnerships support program, designed to provide organizations not just with technology, but with guidance, training, and shared learning.

And we hosted our first m{gathering — an event in NYC that brought together a diverse group of advocates, all united by a shared mission to create a more equitable education system. This event gave leaders a space to exchange ideas, build alliances, and fuel each

other’s ambitions. We identified shared challenges, built trust and alignment around possible solutions, and a shared understanding of what role Murmuration could play in solutions, and where others would have to work together to find other paths forward.

All shared a craving for deeper community connections and expanded analytical tools, and Murmuration’s path forward became all the more clear.

Inspired by partner feedback and vision for what might be possible, we set out to enhance our programmatic offerings, adding model scores tailored to our community of users to help them more effectively target individuals, polling work, and

other analytic products and services to our offerings.

By the time the 2019 m{gathering came around in April, we were ready to take the next step forward in partner support - and we rolled out our enhanced

offerings, shaped by the very voices who had called for them.

In March 2020, the world changed almost overnight. Like countless others, we shuttered our offices, quickly adapted to Zoom meetings, and transformed our homes into workspaces. Yet, despite the pandemic, the 2020 election cycle became our busiest and most pivotal to date.

The scale and evolution of the work taken on by our growing network of partners revealed limitations to our technology we could no longer ignore. So, we made a bold move - to begin what we knew would be a multi-year project of completely rebuilding and expanding our data and tools, while simultaneously growing our community of users beyond the education sector. We

knew to take on this massive undertaking would require building new in-house product, data science and engineering teams. So, we launched a new, wholly owned subsidiary — fondly referred to as TechCo — to house our existing technology, and begin to build out the teams we would need to pursue our vision of a new campaign platform. And in parallel the existing Murmuration team could remain focused on continued service of our growing partner network.

Beyond just the growing scale, the pandemic underscored the need for new types of support. Our partners needed tactical advice guided by new strategies and deeper

research. Groups that had never done mail-in balloting needed to quickly understand how to shift their work towards remote GOTV. Groups that had relied on door-to-door canvassing found themselves needing to contact and connect with people in a digital environment. Those who had, until now, only ever organized around the issue of education, found themselves wading into voting rights, food access, health care, and more. Murmuration responded by offering new kinds of research, from practical analyses to playbooks on running campaigns, some developed in house, and others through new collaborative research efforts with outside research organizations.

First m{staffapalooza all staff retreat

In 2021, our community of users was expanding rapidly as was their demand for increasingly high-quality data and cutting-edge tools. We were in plans to build something bigger, stronger, and more capable of supporting an ever-growing network - and the time to

take on that challenge. We renamed TechCo Helm, and started to build a platform (to be called Organizer by Murmuration upon completion) that was more intuitive and able to give our partners the precision and power they needed to drive real impact. At the same

time, we began to envision what truly advantaged data for community organizing could look like. We knew all of these efforts would take years to come to be, but we were ever excited about the potential for future impact.

As communities across the country began to lean back into in person organizing, Murmuration similarly invested heavily in building connections within our network, and on providing partners with even more tactical and strategic research to inform their

work. Following two years of virtual convenings, in April of 2022 we hosted our first post-pandemic in-person event. For two and a half days in Atlanta, GA, nearly 100 partners explored solutions to the most pressing issues facing our public education system. Through panel

discussions, breakout groups, and field trips, the m{gathering explored new ideas, strategies, and insights to help shape partner work in 2022 and beyond.

In January 2023, seeing the launch of our new platform was imminent and with the goal of ensuring a singular focus on impact and meeting the needs of community focused organizations across the country, Helm’s platform and staff were folded into Murmuration.

This consolidation created greater efficiencies and expanded our ability to secure resources — all in service of driving our mission to power civic participation for a more equitable future. Overnight, our team more than doubled in size, our mission expanded to encompass the pursuit of

equity across myriad systems, and our belief in what was possible had never been greater.

We took the opportunity presented through unification and the impending launch of our new Organizer platform, to tackle our next big goal — the development of an

enriched dataset — Atlas by Murmuration — to help partners more effectively identify individuals and build powerful communities.

It may sound obvious, but people do not live in issue silos, and those working to create equitable pathways for students know all too well that gun safety, access to clean water and climate justice, a functioning democracy, and more impact their communities and students.

Unification, and the development of Organizer and Atlas by Murmuration, enabled us to more deliberately begin to expand our footprint to work with community-focused groups working on our nation’s most pressing challenges and expand our mission to amplify the power of civic

engagement with data, tools, and research for organizations building healthier and more equitable communities.