One Stamp Every 40 months
My interview with Heather Nelson, founder of Poll the Vote
BY ANNE MEEKER
One of the genuine perks of writing this Substack is that I get the chance to speak with a lot of civic engagement entrepreneurs. We are desperately in need of new solutions and new ideas in this space, so let a thousand flowers bloom, and I am always happy to chat with anyone, anytime, for whatever it’s worth.
But I normally have to come into these conversations ready to be a bit of a wet blanket. The landscape for engagement entrepreneurs is a rich problem space, but also a space rich in problems. The market is small. The money is complicated — tangled up in ethics rules, procurement restrictions, and institutional inertia. The customers you invest years building trust with may lose their next election. And the stakes are high: engagement methods that overpromise and underdeliver have the potential to further alienate already-frustrated constituents and deepen the cynicism these tools are supposed to address.
So it is truly exciting when I get to sit down with someone building in this space and find myself, for once, not reaching for the “but.” That’s exactly what happened when I first connected with Heather Nelson and her team at Poll the Vote.
There’s a lot that makes their work interesting, and not least the fact that they break two of the cardinal “rules” I’d normally associate with successful engagement:
First: meet people where they are. The conventional wisdom in civic tech is that you go to the platforms people already use. Poll the Vote asks people to come to them instead, to create an account on a new platform. That’s a big ask — but as Heather and I discuss below, there are some really compelling reasons for that separation, and the challenge may actually be surprisingly surmountable.
Second: separate campaign and governing. At the federal level, the firewall between campaign activity and official activity is sacrosanct, and for good reason. But Poll the Vote intentionally houses both candidate tools and elected official tools on the same platform, with appropriate disclosure walls in place. A voter who discovers a candidate during election season is already plugged in and engaged once that candidate takes office. The transition from campaigning to governing becomes seamless for both the constituent and the officeholder.
One thing in particular that I’d like to call out here, picking up on the thread of campaign spending. In our conversation below, Heather notes some rough numbers on how much campaigns spend to reach their voters on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The figures she cites — $50,000 checks to Meta in the months before a major election — are not unusual. If you stand back and look at that spending in aggregate, across thousands of races at every level of government, it is truly an extractive industry. Enormous sums of money flow out of communities and into the coffers of a handful of tech giants, in exchange for the ability to talk to your own neighbors about governance. That money doesn’t build local capacity. It doesn’t create local jobs.
What Heather is building is the opposite of that. As she puts it in our conversation, the current political climate is challenging — “or you can look at it as an opportunity.” And it is. It’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs in communities across the country to develop local solutions to big challenges — solutions that are grounded in place culturally, relationally, and economically. The relationships that make the tool work are the same relationships that make the community work. That’s what it looks like when civic tech grows out of 23 years embedded in Nebraska’s entrepreneurial and educational communities, instead of parachuting in.
So — more of this. Poll the Vote is the rare civic tech project that feels built by someone who has actually listened — to constituents, to legislators, and to the real constraints both sides face. It’s a project that starts deeply rooted in place and in relationships, but that also harnesses technology as a leveler and carries a vision for how this can all work better. My conversation with Heather is below.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity and may differ slightly from the audio recording.
Anne Meeker: All right, Heather, thank you so much for joining us for Voice/Mail today. You and I met a few months ago, and — well, let me back up.
Doing this Substack, doing the work that I do with POPVOX Foundation, I get a lot of pitches. And I get a lot of people who want to show me their brand new civic engagement platform, saying it’s going to absolutely revolutionize constituent-legislator contact — and I am turning into such a grouch about them. Most of the time, they’re great ideas. They’re well-intentioned, they’re smart people doing it with their hearts in exactly the right place.
But it’s just really hard for me to get excited about them from my perspective as a former staffer, doing the work I do with Congress, with all of this awareness of capacity constraints and resource constraints and legal constraints, ethical constraints, tech constraints. So it was so refreshing when you and I got to chat and I saw Poll the Vote, and I was actually excited.
So I’ve been excited to talk to you ever since. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here with me today.
So, Heather, before you became the founder and CEO of Poll the Vote, tell me about your background in politics. Were you very politically engaged? Is this something you’ve been dreaming of doing for ages? Where did this start?
Heather Nelson: Sure. So I grew up in a very politically informed household. Imagine Heather, ages 0 to 18 — everything revolves around the political environment. I had a father who was very, very civically engaged. He ran for state senator here in Nebraska three times and lost by a small amount of votes each time — so small that it went to a hand count. And I tell people, I think back to the 1970s and ‘80s, when he was running those three times, and how expensive it was for our household. We weren’t a family of billionaires by any means. We were a paycheck-to-paycheck family, working hard. I remember asking my mom, now all of these decades later, “How much did it cost Dad to run back in the ‘80s?” And she said about $40,000 each of the three years. And that has always been heavy on my heart — being a child and experiencing that and wondering, how could normal people get involved in politics? How can normal people raise their hand and say, “I would like to represent our territory at this particular time”? And certainly we’ve seen the monetary factor impact politics. So I’m really excited about how my observation as a child has shaped this, and how hopefully some of the tools and the way that we’ve built at PollTheVote.com can equalize that playing field — whether it’s an incumbent or a challenger — so that we can take money off of the table.
I have pledged that we will make this platform free to all individuals 15 and up in the United States. It has to be, because if we started to charge subscriptions, that again means we’re dividing the playing field between the haves and the have-nots — the people who might be able to spend three bucks or five bucks a month and those that absolutely cannot.
So I’m really privileged that my early years took me back to really thinking hard about how to create this platform. And I’m going to be the first to admit, probably from about my 20s till now — I’m in my mid-50s — it’s not that I was naive. I called myself “nascent.” I just wasn’t involved in politics. I’ve never been one to put a sign in my yard. I’ve never been one to go and vocally advocate, until something happened in 2022, which is how this whole premise of this platform got started.
And for people out there listening, my daytime job, because I really do have another job, is I’m a professor of entrepreneurship. I’m the longest-seated professor of entrepreneurship in the state of Nebraska, and I have been helping people take their dreams and their ideas and get them launched and get them viable and get them to the point where they are able to create jobs and have their dream fulfilled. Well, as I tell people, this one’s mine, and it’s a crazy idea, but that’s okay — I’m going with it.
So in 2022, again, you have to remember I’m not one that is verbally, vocally, outwardly talking in the political world, but our Nebraska legislature made national news. And that’s a really interesting thing — to think that Nebraska, the one-house legislature that is supposed to be totally nonpartisan, has made national news. And I remember the national headline said the word “acrimonious.” And it caught my attention. I’m like, yeah, there’s some acrimonious stuff going on down in Lincoln right now. And I kind of started to watch it. Well, a bill that was passed became very personal to my family. And I see people — elected officials saying, “I’m just doing what our constituents are wanting.” And I said, I’ve lived in my house for 20 years. Our elected officials reach out to me only on the time frame when they want me to vote for them. And then… crickets — they’re gone. So it’s 2025 now. Why can’t we have a way where we, as humans — and here in Nebraska, we call ourselves the Second House — why can’t we have a quick way to collect exactly what constituents want and bring those voices in through the whole course of legislation creation, as I like to say? So that was another catalyst for this idea.
But then this is the big one. I came home from school one night and I was sitting here watching the news, and the news was showing me a mom. I don’t know who she was. I didn’t even know what bill she was testifying on. But she was standing up in front of a panel of eight senators, and she had her child in a wheelchair. She was rocking him back and forth, almost like she had a musical tune in her head. But she was standing up and she was just begging, “Please put this bill to the floor and let the 49 state senators debate it.”
And I had this heartstring pull. I always tell my students, write a business concept that pulls at the heartstrings. All right, well, there you go. I was just pulled to help this mom. Again, I didn’t know who she was or what bill it was. Well, half an hour later, I’m thinking, I’m going to go down to Lincoln tomorrow and help this mom out.
And I went, wait, wait a second, Heather — what you just saw on the news was totally past tense. It’s over. The hearing was today. That’s what the news was showing you. So I just started to ask myself, how do we as normal humans know about public hearings? How do we get notified? And most of us don’t have the luxury to take off work and go down to the Capitol. I’ve seen people haul in from the western side of Nebraska and say that they had gotten up at four in the morning to drive here to testify. And I just think there has to be a better way.
All right. Well, fast forward two weeks. I am a big idea dreamer — I will freely admit it. And this was a literal dream. 3:11 in the morning, I wake up and I had a vision, a dream — I don’t know what to call it — but something happened and I had my phone in my hand and on my phone it said, “Heather, how do you want us to vote for you on this bill tomorrow? For or against?”
And I grabbed my laptop and I bought the domain name PollTheVote.com. I can’t even believe it was available at 3:11 in the morning. And then I remember shutting my laptop, putting it back to the side, and going back to sleep. And I don’t know if I told you, but my family says it should be outlawed for me to buy domains in the middle of the night, because I do this a lot. But this one seemed to stick.
Back in our teachings of entrepreneurship, we always tell people: plan ahead, save, save, save. What are the things that you need? And I’m the one that carries the insurance for our family. And obviously leaving and starting a small business — that’s a pretty detrimental decision. But that early eligibility and the ability to stay on insurance until I’m 65 years old really created a big comfort level for me. So I spent a year — honestly, I tell people I taught every class I could. I taught overtime. I was also on staff at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. So I was teaching over there, running like a mad woman, literally saving and being able to know that I had some startup money saved that we could possibly do this. So in 2023, I took the leap.
But before I did that, I took myself through my typical class structure. Heather, what’s the business concept? Prove the feasibility. Is there a market for this? And I got held up at market and revenue — those two models really challenged me for quite some time.
But going back to class, I was teaching a class and I was asking the students, “What are the four segmentation variables of customers, and which one is the hardest to collect and the most important?” And I kind of stumped them for a moment. So they were thinking through the four. And by the way, people, the four are demographics, geographic, psychographics, and behaviors.
So imagine slicing a person or a business on those four parameters. Which one is the hardest but the best to get? And the answer is psychographic. Getting into someone’s brain — you can’t just observe for that. You have to ask them. You have to take the time to understand their thoughts and their morals and their values.
All of a sudden I started realizing how I could pull this together. And it was beyond just creating a software system that simulates election night, which is what we ended up building.
Think of it like PayPal. On one end, you have your PayPal account, you’ve loaded up your PayPal information, and you tell PayPal to pay X vendor this amount of money — but don’t give them my banking information. PayPal locks that down. And a lot like PayPal, we have people come on board. They create their free account. We have created a patentable methodology that masks everybody. I’m not joking — we spent at least a year and a half, after we received the prototype grant from the State of Nebraska, on actually creating the platform and the methodology itself.
We separate every data point of someone’s personal information so it’s completely stripped and de-identified. I created a platform because I hate it when I get a polling text and I don’t know who you are, I don’t know how you’re going to use my data, I don’t know what side you’re on. I just really don’t know.
So I am hoping that we can become the branded place where people know Poll the Vote. We are here, we are trusted. We are verifying our users. And I’m protecting your sentiment. And I’m not selling your personally identifiable data out to a third party — that’s not who we are. Instead, we can ask quick questions, get your sentiment and feedback, and then I can aggregate all the answers that come in from your territory. So that could be your city council district, your state senator district, your U.S. senator district — however you want, we can collect it. And then I can provide the elected officials with your sentiment answers beyond just yes or no. I can break it down by the demographics, by the geographics, and eventually we’re going to start being able to get into more of the psychographics based on the ideological spectrum that we’re starting to implement.
So it’s amazing where it has evolved. But that original dream I had — that was built. We built that in year one. Here’s what happened. I went through the National Science Foundation I-Corps training program. And that is because, as a data analytics laboratory, at the end of the day, we’re a metric measurement business. So I qualify for National Science Foundation funding, and we’re going after the SBIR grant right now.
In that training program, one of the things they have you do is customer discovery — go talk to your people, go talk and get that input. So I’ve talked with, so far, over a thousand prior and current seated elected officials, candidates who ran, and community leaders, just telling them this concept. What do you think of it? How would you use it? How can it solve your problems?
My state senator met with me and I happened to ask him, “How come elected officials don’t reach out to us beyond election night?”
And he said, “Heather, on day one I get a Gmail account. So until you contact me, I don’t know who you are digitally. I get your physical voter roster, and the only way I can contact you by that voter roster is to send you a letter in the mailbox. But I only get 1,000 stamps a month, and there’s 40,000 of you.”
And I said to him, “So we elect you for 48 months, and you can have one stamp every 40 months to talk to me?” And he goes, “You got it.” And I was like, whoa. Stop everything. And I said to him, “So if I have your constituents on our platform already engaging with us in the bill process, in legislation creation and sentiment collection, why can’t I just create an office account for you that has tools in it and connect the people to the elected officials?”
And he looked at me and goes, “I’m not sure I understand you. You’re the tech person, but okay.” And I said, “Okay, if I created a digital newsletter platform for you, you could send out a digital newsletter. You could talk to us, you could blog with us, you could tell us your daily agenda.” And I said, “And I don’t have to stop there. You can tell us about town halls, you can give us announcements, whatever.”
And so that’s what we’ve been spending the last year and a half on. And that’s really why we delayed a year — we ended up creating this whole constituent management communications system for candidates, elected officials, and advocacy organizations. And that is done. Everything that they can do on Facebook, we’ve built our own Facebook universe. We’ve built our own email newsletter universe. So think of, like, MailChimp or Constant Contact — and then the election sentiment collection software works similarly to a Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey.
So I’m putting all of those tools together in one system, bringing in the verified constituents, and connecting the dots. So now all of a sudden — who cares about one stamp a month anymore, right? You can talk to us every single day for pennies. So we’re pretty excited where we’ve headed to now.
Anne Meeker: As you should be. And it sounds like, from what you just laid out — just to kind of level-set, because most of what we talk about on this Substack is constituent engagement at the federal level — it is so validating on some level to hear that those problems are fractal. They exist at different scales all the way down. Members of Congress come in and they also say, “The resources available to me on the governing side are minuscule compared to what I’m allowed to do and what I can raise funding for on the campaign side.”
So there’s an automatic asymmetry. Yeah, just validating to hear that those problems are the same everywhere. And then you have launched — again, you are based in Nebraska. This is your life. This is your political universe as much as anyone. And so you have really started focusing on Nebraska — this is helping folks with state politics, local politics here, at least to start with, right?
Heather Nelson: Well, I think the “at least to start with” is key.
Anne Meeker: To start with, yes.
Heather Nelson: We’ll get there. So, we have users in all 49 state senator districts in Nebraska on the platform. I can’t believe it. Organic spread. And we have not done a dollar or an ounce of paid advertisement. It has just spread. So it’s wonderful. But it hasn’t stopped there. We have users now in 28 states. We have started to do national polls. And I should say, those 28 states have multiple users in them.
Some are like governors who are watching us. I’ve had candidates from other states that have said, “Hey, I see what you’re doing over in Nebraska. Can I use it?” I’m like, “Yes, yes you can.” So eventually you will be able to choose your state and then your environment will reset. So you can go — I can look at Iowa, for example, if I want to. I can follow the governor of Iowa if the governor’s office turns on their account and wants to use it to communicate to their constituents. So we are definitely headed in that direction, already having traction in 28 other states without doing an ounce, again, of advertisement or work outside Nebraska.
Anne Meeker: That’s amazing. And I really do think — again, part of what struck me the first time you and I talked was you talked about that experience of going out and talking to the elected officials. There are so many — one of the big flaws that I see, again, in a lot of these civic tech ideas is that they focus exclusively on the constituent side. How do I make the constituent experience better? How do I make what the constituent is looking at go faster? Or exclusively on the legislator side — how do I support things for the legislator’s office? And you are really marrying them both together.
And speaking of marrying all the things — you raised this a little bit, but one thing that I also find so fascinating is that you are combining the official governing side and the campaign side into one place. So tell me how that works.
Heather Nelson: Yeah. So I have been the gal in my family and circle that does the Excel spreadsheet methodology of preparing for my ballot. I know it sounds really crazy, but — and I think this goes back to how I was raised — I want to look at people beyond a party. I want to understand them. It’s like a résumé interview to me, right? What’s your background? What are your priority points? What is your ideology? I’m not married to party. I’m looking at more cause and relation to my family. So I would do this Excel spreadsheet and people would be like, “I’m in your district, can I see your Excel spreadsheet?” so that they could have that information really, really quickly to look at and, as I say, make the best decision for you.
So I took that thought process and we mirrored the electoral side. So those that are our elected officials have their office accounts. And now we’ve opened up the candidate side. So the incumbents can have a separate account on the candidate side. We have put up a Chinese wall, because our accountability and disclosure requirements require us to do that, and we’ve added the disclosure section so that all the requirements that they need to publicly disclose are there. Otherwise, our candidates get the same thing. There’s no negativity. They cannot call each other out. As I tell people, to me this is candidate season — we have six months until the May election. Talk to us. Use the tools that are in there. Everybody gets a micro landing page and it all looks alike, so they fill in their sections. Here’s the “About the Candidate” so I can read it. Give me some pictures. Here’s my priority issues. Here is my plan for day one. And here’s my ideology summary. So everything I was doing on my Excel spreadsheet I’ve now built out for the candidates — they can go and fill in the information.
And then we just created — and I don’t even know if I told you this — we just created a ballot planner. So think, now over the next five months, my candidates can use the tools. They can run a digital town hall. They can fire out a listening session poll. They can post announcements, invite me to their kickoff events, tell me when they’re having different things happening. We do allow them to back-link to their regular website or to a donate button, because I didn’t want to get into actually collecting donations — so that’s off our platform. But we do provide a back-link for that. And I love how the candidates are embracing it and are posting videos and posts and town halls.
I have one gentleman who has his listening session running, and one of his questions that he put out there was, “What do you need to know about me in order to gain your vote?” And people are writing in and saying, “In this politically challenging time frame, what is your plan to work across the aisle?” Or, “What are the first three bills you plan to put in if we elect you as our representative?”
Those are interesting topics. So I called him up and I said, “Hey, are you looking at your data? Because you’re getting great engagement.” He’s already had five times more users come onto the platform since he put his listening session poll out there. So people are seeing it in his district, they’re coming on, creating their account, and engaging with his survey.
So one Saturday morning I said, “Let’s get on video. I’m going to host and I’m going to ask you the questions coming in from your constituents.” And we did. We had a good dialogue. And I really haven’t parlayed this yet, people — I am independent, nonpartisan. We have to be. We don’t take sides. Everybody can use the platform. We represent the data as it comes in, even if I personally may not like it and it may not align with my personal views. Really, Heather Nelson the person, doesn’t exist anymore, right? I am here as a steward of the sentiment that’s coming in. So I played that role of basically just a machine, asking him the questions.
So we were able to get his video out — now his video is running through his district. People are able to watch, and he’s proving to people he’s listening. And here are the answers to the questions that you’re asking me. And I’m like, woo, that’s pretty cool.
Anne Meeker: I’m so fascinated, and there’s such interesting jujitsu that you are doing on multiple levels here that really has some pretty far-reaching impact for how we think about that split between official and governing. I had a conversation with Lee Drutman a while ago. We talked a little bit about incumbency advantage and how that really privileges folks who are already in office. And this might start to address that a little bit.
And then also doing such fascinating things where someone might become interested in politics because of the campaign cycle, but then they are already on your platform, already plugged in to being more engaged, being more attuned, being more reachable to folks after they are elected, which is so interesting.
Heather Nelson: So we had a city council candidate that jumped into the race — I think he tells people with 72 days to go, like at the very last minute, he jumped in. And I met him at an event several months ago and I was telling him about our new candidate platform that we’re getting ready to open up.
And he said to me, “I’m running again in four years. Can I have my candidate page on your platform?” And I sat there and I went, yes, yes, you can. Because again, it’s candidate season, right? We should be able to get to know these people over a period of time so that people are well aware — he’s branded, they know his priorities. And they’re either going to use the ballot planner and say, “Yes, this is my person,” or no. And that’s okay. But that’s what it’s out there for.
Anne Meeker: It almost starts to edge up to the way a parliamentary system would have a shadow cabinet — like you might have a shadow member from the opposing party and get to really engage and pay attention over a long period of time to, “Well, this is how it might be different. This is how this other person might be making different decisions.”
Heather Nelson: Interesting. I like that. I like that concept.
Anne Meeker: Well, we talk all the time about what we can learn from parliamentary democracies, and now what we can learn from the state level. Fun stuff.
Heather Nelson: Speaking of candidates — in Nebraska, we have several people running for state Senate positions that are already loaded up on the candidate platform. But we have a person running for governor, we have a person running for U.S. Congress, and we have a person running for U.S. Senate already on the platform. And we just opened it up just a little bit ago.
Anne Meeker: Well, and that really speaks to — I think you are tapping into something that I see so much, which is that constituents and legislators both are so unhappy with the state of the resources available to them to do their work, the avenues for discussion. It seems like we really are in this moment where — we see these moments periodically in our politics, but especially right now — there is appetite for something new.
We frame this as the pacing problem at POPVOX Foundation. Our whole work is to help legislators keep pace with rapid changes in tech and society. We talk about three different phases of the pacing problem. There is external — can legislatures keep pace with tech? There is inter-branch — can legislatures keep pace with executive branches?
And then there’s keeping pace with the public, with public expectations. We are used to certain methods of interacting with companies, with the big entities in our lives. And then we come to government — and not only executive branch government, but legislative branch government. And as you said, it’s a Gmail and 4,000 stamps.
There is so much space that Congress — definitely — and certainly state legislatures have to bend that pacing curve up. So it seems like you’re tapping into the right moment, bringing the right tech to the right moment, in a way that’s really exciting.
Heather Nelson: Thank you. I do think that we showed up at the right time. I will say that. And I’m really thankful that we chose to stay quiet for the — the 2022 thought process. I was just formulating. And then in 2023, we started prototyping and interviewing and collecting that research and trying to figure out how to architect this all together.
Obviously we leaned in very heavily to the experience on everybody’s side on technology. But safety and protocol and security was high on the list. And I tell people, that took us a year. Now granted, we all work full-time jobs. This is a weekend, basement, night business so far. But it is fascinating to see where it has come to.
In January 2025, we launched quietly. And that was when we started beta testing, right after the ‘24 presidential election. And I should say, we actually did a little bit through the election season process during 2024, because I remember election night, we were watching our data and watching the results come in and saying, “Oh my gosh, our data is paralleling what the Secretary of State is putting out.” I mean, it was really, really very cool to see that.
But now we’re light years beyond that. We just came off of the legislative session — January through June — we did three bills. That’s all we could do was three. But we had users. We went down and we testified as neutral, reading the report into public record.
I was told that we had senators who were going over our data in the hearings and they were calling out what their constituents were saying, what other people’s constituents were saying. And then on the floor of the legislature, they actually used our data three different times between April, May, and June. And again, it was another really critical moment over here. We were like, “Oh my gosh, we were just used on the floor. This is amazing.”
Anne Meeker: Incredible. It’s working. And that leads us to something I really wanted to get into, specifically from your perspective. Again, we’ve seen this cycle in our work at the congressional level. Someone has a great idea. They build an awesome tool. They get grant funding, they get VC funding, startup funding to build an awesome tool. And then the business ecosystem for civic tech work — and especially civic tech that ties into the legislatures — that is a tough business environment. It is a small market. There is not a lot of money in it. And then what money is there is also tied up in ethical restrictions and House rules, Senate rules — it’s tied up in some really interesting ways that limit adoption. We certainly see this at the federal level. Even if candidates want to be using cool tools, there are a lot of guardrails that prevent them — some of them very good guardrails that should exist — that prevent them from being adopted easily.
So I’m super curious. Just reflections from your long career teaching people entrepreneurship in the private sector — how does that translate? How has that shaped your experience? What has surprised you about developing tools for the civic tech world?
Heather Nelson: I’ll be honest with you — I didn’t even know the lingo “civic tech” and “GovTech” existed as an industry sector. Biotech? Yes. Fintech? Yes. InsurTech? Yes. MedTech? Yes. Civic tech, government tech — that wasn’t an area I knew until people started saying, “Oh, you’re in this space.” And I’m like, I am in this space? Okay, let me figure this space out. So that was a learning for me. But when I do a lot of speaking — basically for anybody that will have us, because that’s really how we’ve gotten the organic spread — I teach full time, and I can go talk to a room of 10 to 500 people and then we’re reaching them in masses.
And my favorite question to ask is, “Raise your hand — who wants to get up tomorrow and just change their life and start a business in civic tech and government tech?” And everyone giggles. And I’m like, right?
Not only is it incredibly hard, but the climate that we’re in is challenging. Or you can look at the climate that we’re in as an opportunity. And I guess that’s how I’ve decided to look at it — if I can build something that makes a difference to someone’s life and be able to have that voice be represented, then that’s a win. It might be a small win for the day, but it’s a win.
And it’s been very humbling. I’ve had people I don’t know write in to me and just say, “Thank you for creating the platform.” We had a senator who was doing a lot of testing, asking her constituents what they wanted on different bills during the Senate session last year. And one of the feedback she got — I knew it was probably going to be in dissension of maybe what she wanted — but that’s okay. It was what her constituents said. But then the constituents said, “Thank you for just taking the opportunity to ask me.” And I always go back to Conflict Resolution 101: ask, get people to the table, just talk through some things. And even though I know the answer is not always going to be in my personal favor, at least I had an opportunity to participate. I was included. I was heard. I was asked. And then maybe next year we can make another dent. Maybe the following year we can move stuff forward. But entering into the civic tech space has been hard, I will tell you.
And I freely talk about this, but I will never name names publicly by any means. But there have been some elected officials who blatantly tried to put roadblocks up for me because they don’t want me to get this up and running. And I don’t speak about it publicly with their names. I don’t tell their constituents. But that just fires up this little redhead to have a greater amount of tenacity to say, this is why we need a platform to represent the people and to get representation that will represent their people.
Anne Meeker: Okay, that is so interesting. And I very much respect you not wanting to get too deep into the specifics of those private conversations with these folks. But I am just curious — part of what we cover here is also how methods of constituent engagement are the product of tradition, the product of vendor capture and vendor lock-in.
There are a lot of elements that go into creating the system of constituent engagement we have today. And as you said, that creates entrenched interests. So from the many conversations you’ve had where folks have been pushing back or been really skeptical about your work — if you’re comfortable sharing — what is the pushback? What are they saying?
Heather Nelson: Yeah, I honestly think at the end of the day, the question that I get the most is, “How do we trust you? How do we know — who is Heather Nelson? What is she creating and how is she going to use the data? How are you securing it?” And so I have become very transparent about all of those answers.
And I think that has helped me win over even the people that put the roadblocks up in front of me — they’re now starting to go, “Okay, now I realize what you’re doing. And this is actually kind of interesting.” And by the way, that’s the word that people say to me all the time — “interesting.” And I’m like, thank you. It’s not a no. It’s an “interesting.” But I definitely encourage anyone out there — if you have an idea and it’s in your wheels, do your homework. Go ask people, make connections. People are out there. Some are going to be more willing to help you than others. I’ve walked that pathway over the last two and a half, three years now on this venture.
But at the end of the day, I just have to come back to my own mission. And that was — I wanted my voice to be represented, and I didn’t find a platform that was able to do it at this level, to actually intrinsically impact legislation creation. And I think we are — well, I know that we are there, because our representatives are calling me and saying, “Can I ask you questions? Can you do a deep dive? Can you explain this to me?” And I’m like, “Absolutely. We will sit down and help you understand what your constituents are saying.”
Now, everything is masked and aggregated. So there is no identifiable data that is given. But just to be able to talk in those aggregate sums of who your people are, what they are wanting, and what they’re saying — that’s amazing.
Anne Meeker: From this experience, it sounds like you’ve had some incredible support from some local Nebraska programs on entrepreneurship and talent and startups. And there’s one we didn’t get into today, but you and I discussed previously — there was access to local AI models, which is incredible.
Heather Nelson: Oh, yes, absolutely. So, our CTO and myself — one day, well, more than one day, but one day we really had what I call the bootcamp around artificial intelligence. So that was early on in the planning, and we were looking at off-the-shelf platforms that we could bring in. We were looking at creating our own. And finally he said to me, “Heather, we have to write our own.” And he goes, “I’m sorry. It’s going to take us a lot more money and a lot more time.” And I was like, “But if it’s the best thing we have to do, we will do it.” The reason being, once we start integrating with a third-party off-the-shelf platform, you need to be careful about how they’re using the information that’s running through it and how they’re locking that down and securing it.
And that’s why we were choosing to build our own — until something interesting happened. And I know this is what you were alluding to. So the Omaha Chamber of Commerce learned that our big data technology center here in Omaha, called the Scott Technology Data Center — which actually is literally located in the building across from where my professor office is. So imagine me like a little Frogger running back and forth between the two buildings. That is my life. And what I’m trying to say is my team is now inside the incubator in the Scott Technology Data Center. And it’s all due to this AI opportunity. So there is a platform that Scott Data has licensed, and it sits on top of — or can someday, when we actually get this going — it will sit on top of our database. And we will be able to not only go in and look at the items that we are analyzing, like a particular survey or poll or listening session — what are people saying through those instruments — but we can run AI over it.
And we can have it do either formulative things that we actually want it to go find, or generative things that we want it to be crawling. And all of a sudden we’ll get a report that says, “Interesting thing happening today across the nation,” or in a particular town or state, and kind of see the sentiment shifting — what topics are bubbling up.
And we’re very, very excited to be able to have that right here in Omaha, Nebraska. We really do have some good things going on in our local market. So we’re happy to be an incubator client now, and then someday soon, hopefully getting that program overlaid onto our database so we can get some cool things coming out of it.
Anne Meeker: Oh my gosh, just furthering my long, long-standing chip on my shoulder that there is such cool stuff happening in the Midwest and across the country that just does not get the airtime. Yeah, maybe that’s for the best sometimes. But it just doesn’t get the airtime in what we usually think of as the civic engagement world, the civic tech world.
But where we think this is really interesting is all of the pieces that had to come together to make you possible. If we’re thinking about the civic tech world as a market, these particular supports, these particular programs came together to let you, in Nebraska, develop a tool that seems uniquely suited — and you’ve gained the trust in your local community. This is your people, your state, your backyard.
You’ve created this thing to serve them the way you are hearing they need to be served. If we wanted to replicate that — I’m so curious if you have thoughts and recommendations for national programs, for other states to come together to say, “We would like to see our own crop of backyard civic entrepreneurs. We’re putting jobs here. We’re not putting this advertising money into Meta. We are putting it into Poll the Vote here in Nebraska.” What pieces of what worked for you do you think are replicable that would help foster the civic engagement landscape?
Heather Nelson: Well, I think first and foremost — you talked about putting money into an instrument like Meta. As I was doing my research and looking at what past candidates were spending, to be able to see that a $50,000 check on average was being written to Meta in the four, five, and six months prior to our major elections in the last couple of years was pretty jaw-dropping.
That’s a huge amount of money. And I’d encourage people to look at civic tech as an opportunity. Again, I didn’t know it was a sector — I know that sounds naive of me, especially being in the entrepreneurial innovation space. It wasn’t really on my radar.
So I do think that it would be good for states to look and say, “Okay, do we bring Poll the Vote to their state?” I would hope so, because no one wants to have to replicate an animal like this. And part of the juice of how it works is because we all are on the same platform and have the same information, same voice, same opportunity.
But certainly, how can we do more in civic education? How can we do more in voter engagement? How can we do better in making a candidacy opportunity available to everybody, no matter what your pocketbook or your job schedule might be? So there are things that can be created and done out there. Here in Omaha, there’s a gal I met and she is working in the civic tech / GovTech space too.
And I should introduce you here someday. But she is creating video gaming and a reward system for people to engage in civic life. And obviously some of those things are popping up because we are aware of some other things happening around the nation. But I happened to say to her one day — she goes, “This is really expensive. I have to create a platform. I have to create the users. I’ve got to get them on.”
And I went, “Oh, stop right there. I’ve already done that.” I said, “I just want you to think for the next day — how can you take your dream of gamifying civic tech education and run it on my platform?”
Because then you don’t have to do any of that lifting. And her eyes just got really big. And so I think of these collaborations, right? Don’t spin your wheels trying to get the same person to download ten apps. What can we build together? What can we do together? And I really do think that there could be multiple things happening on our platform, whether they’re coming from our company or someone else’s company that we start partnering with. So that’s really cool.
Anne Meeker: I think that is really exciting. And I know it ties into some conversations I know Congress world is having about the future of CRM and how we can plug other entrepreneurs into those already existing platforms. So again, it’s just helpful and validating to know that everything we talk about federally is already happening at the state level — and in many places, apparently Nebraska is way ahead of the federal level.
Heather Nelson: I think that every state has its secret sauce, and it just has to bubble up and get attention — and that’s the hard thing.
Anne Meeker: Amazing. Heather, it’s been such a pleasure getting to follow your work over the last year, and such a pleasure to get to dive really deep into your experience and Poll the Vote and where you’re hoping it goes. So thank you so much — very busy season — for taking the time to chat with us today. We’re so excited to see new ideas and new tools. That is truly, truly what we need for this moment. So just really exciting to see your work here. Thank you again.
Voice/Mail is a Substack newsletter about how people and their governments talk to each other. Learn more and subscribe at voicemailgov.substack.com.
