Overview
Rep'd is both a city government software provider for residents to ask city officials quesitons directly and get a video answer from them as well as a civic engagement platform that powers the digital conversation between voters and candidates, constituents and elected officials.
For many voters, participation in an election goes beyond voting to include wanting to directly connect with candidates and contribute their time and/or money to a campaign.
Rep’d’s Co-Founders (and brothers), Mike and Dave Baumwoll, identified this trend and had the vision of a platform to empower transparent democracy and a more direct connection between voters and candidates.
Challenge
For the first version of Rep’d, Mike and Dave wanted to include the following functionality:
• Allow voters to submit and upvote questions directly to candidates regarding their policy priorities for jobs, education, climate change, and more
• Allow candidates to record video answers to voter questions and post them on their own branded Rep’d page
• Notify voters via email when a candidate answered their question
• Drive donations and volunteers to candidate campaigns
• Allow candidates to analyze voter trends + data
It was going to require white label architecture comprising a candidate-side web portal with secure login, management oversight, and platform analytics.
Development & Implementation
First step was to create detailed wireframes which Rep’d’s designer provided. Then our development team analyzed each task in Jira and wrote the API document and data schema prior to going into code.
Mike and Dave had worked with us on an earlier start-up called Minque, a question and answer platform dedicated to connecting curious minds with educated video answers.
For Minque we had written a custom video player for iOS and uploaded and stored the user-generated videos on AWS while keeping the backend API separate on Heroku for easy control over speed of scaling.
For Rep’d however, the focus was more on performance and on server cost because a wider audience was anticipated from the beginning.
We wrote Rep’d to be lightweight with code preprocessors, instead of using a framework like Angular or React, so that we could deploy code quickly, which is important in a white label platform when new clients are continuously being brought onboard and we need to deploy fast to their sub-domain on Rep’d.
Challenges included a very tight budget, so tight we threw in project management hours at no cost and also additional small features throughout the development. We are shareholders in their company, a position we rarely take with client projects, but Mike and Dave are the nicest customers to work with. They were very patient when our updating on tasks was slow at times, as well as on feature development, while we struggled with resources for the budget - the dev team was essentially a paid team of 1 with a stand-in for emergencies.
To the original scope we added more advanced analytics and a way of viewing them in DataStudio, improving the stats presentation for white label clients. For the DataStudio integration, we created a stats database to connect to each white label clients’ database. This proved challenging because a lot can go wrong with syncing stats across our internal databases and Google Analytics in a straightforward query for DataStudio to read.
We also wrote our own teleprompter mode as a way for Rep’d clients to record themselves in real time on their admin panel. We had an issue with recorded videos being saved in .webm which is not supported by the Safari browser, so we converted .webm videos on the API to .mp4.
We also added a NYC Candidates page, integrating the official government API for locating your voter district and representatives, and added Universal Login, allowing signed-up users to auto-sign in across all other candidate pages on Rep’d.
We’ve since integrated NGP VAN - the largest privately owned voter database and partisan provider of campaign compliance software, used by most Democratic members of Congress, to better analyze grassroots voter trends and data.
Results
At the starting gate Rep’d signed 11 candidates and counting for a variety of political races throughout the country and raised investment to build out the platform. Rep’d is scaling fast with a very flexible product/market fit for candidates and major organizations.