we are relentless
We BUILD PROGRAMS AND TECH TO BRING relational TO VOTERS AT SCALE.
Relentless unlocks political power using relational mobilization.
At the center of everything we do are the stakeholders: the voters, volunteers, mobilizers, and community members who have the most at stake.
We make intentional choices about what we don’t do: we don’t scrape data, we don’t sell data, we don’t treat volunteers like data mines.
Relentless is built on the belief that the political power we need is in the relationships we already have.
Read our Mission + Values.
2021
The GA runoff race for Jon Ossoff was the first instance of online paid relational mobilization at scale: in less than a month Davis Leonard and Zoe Stein built a relational network of 160k voters that Senator Ossoff said “won the race”.
This relational program proved it was possible to mobilize voters relationally and at scale.
Davis and Zoe published their learnings in ”How we built a relational network of 160k voters in less than a month” with Joshua Krazvitz.
2022
Relentless was cofounded by Davis Leonard, Greta Carnes and Zoe Stein to bring online relational organizing at scale to the progressive movement.
The first problem to address was tech. No tech product had been designed from the ground up for relational organizing with mobilizers at the center of the product — which meant mobilizers had a less-than-ideal user experience and program staff weren’t easily able to measure the impact of the program.
The team designed the product they wished they had had on their own relational programs — for the Ossoff runoff and Pete Buttigieg’s organizing program, which Greta ran — and Rally was launched that summer.
During the midterms Relentless battle-tested Rally on seven scaled programs in battleground states, culminating in a program for the Georgia runoff that was set up in 5 days, and built a network of 70,000 people within 10 days:
92.5% of the relational network matched with the voter file.
23% of the relational network did not vote in 2020.
3,000 voters in the relational network voted in the runoff election, despite not voting in the general election one month earlier.
2023
Until 2023, Rally was exclusively used by mobilizers in programs run by Relentless teams. In July, Rally was released to campaigns and organizations running their own relational programs, so they could easily see who their program is reaching, how frequently, and who their most influential supporters were. This release included real-time mapping features showing program staff who their program is reaching while the program is underway.
We also ran a scaled paid relational program during the 2023 election cycle to engage low-propensity Black voters in support of Brandon Presley’s campaign for Mississippi Governor. The program reached over 70,000 voters:
82% of the relational network were Black voters.
More than 50% did not vote in 2019.
More than 50% of the network did not vote in 2022.
Before 2023 closed, we teamed up with Progessive Turnout Project to run the largest-ever partisan paid relational program for the 2024 presidential race (which we announced in May 2024).
2024
This year we are running the largest-ever partisan paid relational program, in partnership with Progressive Turnout Project, focused on contacting low-propensity voters in battleground states.
This is what we have been building towards. In 2024, more people than ever before will be contacted about the election by someone they already know and trust. And by offering compensation, we will be able to recruit mobilizers who can reach voters that aren’t being reached by traditional cold voter contact programs — voters who have moved, or haven’t voted for a while, or who changed their phone number. Voters whose numbers might only be known by their family members or their close neighbors, and who don’t answer the door to strangers or simply aren’t home during the day. Voters who matter just as much as those who have remained in the same home, with the same phone number, for years.
You Can Get Paid to Talk to Friends About Voting
“Annoying texts and disinformation campaigns have wrecked get-out-the-vote drives. Relentless, a progressive organizing group, thinks it has a solution: you.”
