 Hi everybody, I'm Miha Sifri. I am the president and co-founder of Civic Hall, coming to you from my home office just north of New York City, and sadly not there, which is Cédric Fjordor, which is this wonderful place on the eastern side of Iceland that I was hoping we somehow would be able to be at, but still good to be with you. Yeah, and so I'm Matt Stembeck. I'm a senior researcher at Civic Hall, and together we curate the Civic Tech Field Guide, which catalogs the tools and resources and activities to better inform our sector. It's a living repository, so we currently have over 3,700 categorized entries of Civic Tech projects. There's another 400 or so in the pipeline, and we also have a calendar of upcoming events, fellowships, grants, and we benefit from working with over a dozen volunteer page curators, and we welcome new ones, so people representing their city or country or topic, and we also use the database of the Civic Tech Field Guide to conduct research, to better understand impact in our field, and you can find the guide at civictech.guide. There's a little screenshot from the map. So we launched the Civic Tech Field Guide actually at TicTech in 2016, where a lot of people helped add contributions to what was then just a very simple, open Google spreadsheet, and it has continued to benefit from hundreds of user submissions. At last year's TicTech, working with Alia Baccia and Sruti Modakirti, we presented our timeline of the field's development from 1994 to 2018, to help illuminate the larger trends for more than 2,000 launches over that timeframe. That's just a shot of what it looks like before you play with it, you can get into it at civictech.guide slash timeline. And at TicTech 2018, we gave a presentation on the Civic Tech Graveyard, profiling projects that once had significant funding and usage, but are no longer around, to help learn what's worked and what hasn't. So the graveyard research has helped us discover, for example, that a large amount of early money in a Civic Tech project isn't always the blessing it might seem. You can visit the Civic Tech Graveyard at civictech.guide slash graveyard. So this year we decided to focus on organizations that have managed to survive and even thrive in the difficult field of civic engagement, social change, and the digital transformation of democracy. And of the thousands of Civic Tech organizations and projects around the world, only a small fraction of them have lasted over 10 years so and are still around. So building off of our previous timeline research, we worked with Dibilina Mukherjee to slice our data and we found about 70 core Civic Tech groups that made it this long without shutting down or getting acquired. And that naturally leads to the following question, which is how did we define core Civic Tech? And we decided to center organizations that focus on enhancing how people engage with government or how they engage in organizing themselves to achieve civic goals. And that means we left out adjacent entities such as long running political consulting vendors that do digital strategy like Blue State Digital and big crowdfunding platforms that don't center civic needs like Indiegogo and GoFundMe. So we then started about understanding how they've done it, how they lasted. Earlier this year, Civic Hall brought together 14 of these Civic Tech founders and executive directors for a half day deep dive to discuss their longevity in the field. And then less than a month ago, we conducted a detailed survey of executive directors and founders of the organizations that have been active for at least the past 10 years. And of the 70 organizations, we were able to secure 22 responses. Now while we were doing that research, the world around was changing in a way that could define us for years to come. The coronavirus pandemic when global and all of our lives are different now. We're adapting as well. And we've just launched a coronavirus response page on the Civic Tech field guide. We're curating new funding opportunities, projects you can adapt or get involved in and online events like this one that the Civic Tech community can join from anywhere. You can visit that at civictech.guide slash coronavirus. One of the things that we're aiming to do here is to be selective and focus attention on efforts that are genuinely meeting a need as opposed to literally cataloging every new idea out there. It's a paradox of moments like this that suddenly thousands of well-intentioned techies wanna help, but all too often they reinvent the wheel and draw resources and attention away from the most effective projects and organizations. So we're happy with our original longevity research and we're gonna share the findings with you today. But we're also now living in a world where Civic Hall has closed its physical space in New York. Whole countries are in lockdown. We couldn't go to Iceland today. So we decided to refocus this presentation on what we're learning about how to last in Civic Tech to adjust this new reality. And we'll still be publishing the full findings on Civic Hall's blog, Civic Kissed. So we are in a period of great uncertainty where the economic foundations of many organizations may be battered or disappear entirely and where the need for Civic Tech solutions may shift and even expand radically. This could be an extinction level event for nonprofits. According to John McIntosh of SeaChange, writing on CNN.com just a few days ago, he says his research quote suggests that less than half of nonprofits, and this is the United States, have one month of operating reserves and less than six months of cash to keep them running. Without outside help, the trajectory of demise for many nonprofits is clear. The executive directors and boards delay taking tough restructuring actions. The organizations have to stiff their vendors, then furlough or layoff staff. The founders stop paying themselves. And finally, they shut down when the bank account is dry and payroll can't be made. Yikes. So let's get into the findings. First, just to revisit our universe, who did we talk to? Well, to help advise us, we got in touch with as many of the founders and current executive directors of long-lasting Civic Tech organizations as possible. We are certain to be missing great organizations from this list. Today, it reminded us that Cicero belongs on this list as well, so we'd love to talk with you. The median year of founding of our survey respondents was 2005. And to repeat, there was 22 founders and executive directors replying to our survey and 14 who participated in our in-person deep dive. There was some overlap between these two groups because we allowed survey participants to maintain anonymity. We estimate that in all, we got information from a little more than 30 leaders. And of the organizations represented, about 70% were nonprofits and 30% for-profits and B-Corps. They span the gamut in terms of employee headcount, one proxy for size. And they had a variety of income sources. Some mentioned multiple sources, but the primary income for slightly more than half was user fees and foundation support. So, how have these organizations managed to last 10 years or more? Of all the lessons learned, the most commonly and passionately cited factors were these three. First, the tenacity of founders and their teams. Second, having a strong product or service offering that really resonates with a clear market. And third, strong relationships with well-aligned founders, funders, excuse me. So, on that first one, tenacity, or as one of our post-it authors put it, the white-knuckled tenacity of our founders. There's a lot inside that idea. It includes smart management, the ability to pivot, the courage to make tough financial decisions when necessary. Our survey results showed this clearly, but inside the workshop conversation that we did when people were face-to-face, what was also clear was not just the tenacity of the founders, it's also the resilience of their teams. Great talent and a strong community culture are also key variables in the success of these organizations in the face of adversity. In other words, founders, don't try and get through this by yourselves. Yeah, so basically everyone we spoke to has experienced moments of saying, thinking this might be it, we might be over. So, leaders of organizations that we might all agree are the success stories of our field have had weeks and even months where they felt like failures. Even among the largest organizations we talked to, one with over 200 full-time employees being willing and able to make tough decisions during economic downturns was key. So, nearly 80% of our group has had to shut down programs due to a serious funding crisis. Over 60% have had to furlough staff at some point and just over a half have had to consider closing entirely. So, these are the facts from the organizations that have made it over 10 years. So, clearly life is not easy as a civic tech innovator and the majority of the founders we spoke to and surveyed had periods where they were unable to pay their own salary and were dependent on others for their living. And we believe this finding has clear implications for founder diversity in civic tech. A second key lesson that came up and again was the critical importance of strong product market fit and finding your audience niche. We'd argue that this is even more important now in the midst of what is certain to be a challenging time. Half of the organizations in our survey sample reported that they've had to pivot or significantly change their core offering sometime in their journey. So, nailing that product market fit, pawning your offering to the audience that needs it might well require change in our parts. If the true need out there today is X and you've been offering Y and Z, you need to reimagine how you're going to help solve for X. It's understandable if you want to hide inside right now with so much trauma and uncertainty in play but there's a lot of work to do and we should be careful not to reinvent the wheel but to ask and listen carefully to what people and organizations most need help with. Last and not least, the majority of our respondents noted the importance of strong relationships with enlightened funders, both in the survey responses and in our deep dive workshop and in person we were also able to learn more about the many challenges that come in working with funders. If you look at that, go back a step, Matt. If you look at this, this is the brain mapping exercise that we did and on the left in the green are the various categories where people were describing different factors in their success. On the right in the yellow are the factors that are sources of challenge. That very one large clump to the right is funders. So on the plus side, long running civic tech organizations say they have strong relationships with their funders. Among our survey respondents, over 83% feel their funders' priorities and time horizons match their own organizations. Of course, the correlation is not causation. Another key ingredient to success that came out in the conversations were what kinds of relationships matter. Having funders who are willing to take risks or at least tolerate a level of risk. Many of our respondents also talked about the fact that they have diversified sources of income, not having all of their eggs in one funding basket as vital to their success. In terms of challenges, those yellow post it's on the right. Even successful civic tech founders report that fundraising can be a bear. Mentioning problems like lacking connections to funders, needing to deal with some funders' emphasis on whatever the new thing is at the moment and their tendency to reward the busiest projects as opposed to the most useful or impactful. The ever present challenges that come with restricted funding instead of general operating support. And in some cases, the lack of understanding of the nonprofit sector on the part of some funders. On that front, COVID-19 is definitely shaking up some parts of philanthropy. We're seeing statements from hundreds of large and small foundations promising now to be more flexible as they help their grantees and programs to survive the current crisis. For years, grantees have been asking foundations to provide more general operating support as well as greater flexibility in achieving their program goals. And it now looks like coronavirus is spurring many of them to change their processes accordingly. It's far too soon to say if this will be enough, but it certainly welcome news. So as we were preparing for this talk for you today, we want to honor and acknowledge the hard place many of us are in right now, especially those of you leading organizations that others depend on. So right now, many of the long running civic tech organizations we spoke to are dealing as best they can with the crisis. A quick scan we did shows some groups are focused on hunkering down and figuring out how to take care of their staffs while starting to dip their toes into providing their services virtually, which is understandable. Some who are in the business of providing software platforms for civic organizing like the ones we've seen today have already made their tools free for governments, agencies and NGOs providing essential services and emergency responses. And some civic tech veterans are already organizing efforts to figure out how to augment government capacity with tech workers, while others are already at work figuring out how the US might have to move to a national vote by mail election this year. We're also seeing some of the transparency watchdog groups shifting their monitoring efforts to try and ferret out corruption or other problems that may arise as governments start to inject billions and trillions of dollars into relief programs. We're also seeing some massive virtual hackathons and local civic tech and mutual aid groups figuring out how they can help local neighborhoods take care of people most in need. It's gonna be easier for some groups to pivot than others and really none of us knows fully what lies ahead. We hope our presentation on what has helped civic groups last in the past may give you some guidance or orientation on where we go next. And as we mentioned earlier, we'll share this research in full on Civicist, Civic Hall's blog and news site. Thank you and we look forward to the discussion.