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Emma Bloomberg and Murmuration: Technology, Data, Research, and the Power of Community-driven Civic Engagement
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In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Emma Bloomberg, the founder and CEO of Murmuration, a nonprofit technology company that works with local organizations to amplify the power of civic engagement by providing the data, tools, and research necessary to build healthier and more equitable communities. Bloomberg has been working with communities and leaders for over 20 years to tackle some of our country’s most pressing challenges. She founded Murmuration with the belief in the power of community driven civic engagement to affect sustainable systems change.
We begin the conversation with some of Bloomberg’s formative personal and professional experiences: her childhood “rooted in deep civic engagement,” and the belief that we all have “a responsibility to help make our community a better place;” the opportunity, just out of college, to work on her father Mike Bloomberg’s first mayoral campaign; an early stint in city government focused on the creation of the 311, New York City’s government service information line, and her time at the Robin Hood foundation, New York City’s largest poverty fighting nonprofit and philanthropy.
Over the years, and through her work with many community-based organizations, Bloomberg observed how access to better tech and data infrastructure could make their work more efficient, effective, and therefore higher impact. Murmuration set out to solve this problem by serving community organizations with tools, data, and, more recently, research and insights — often tailored to a very local context.
We explore critical decision points in Murmuration’s ten-year evolution, including the choice to understand community organization needs and fit with existing products in the marketplace, curate those off the shelf tools and data, identify gaps, acquire the IP of existing tech companies, and only then begin to create tools in-house with requisite partner knowledge and engineering and product development expertise. Bloomberg also explains what it means to be a truly mission driven technology company, electing to incorporate as a nonprofit (versus a fully commercial entity) to better serve the needs of community-based organizations.
We end with a discussion of Murmuration’s newest offerings — original research and insights — among them a three-year deep dive into the aspirations, concerns, beliefs and behaviors of Gen Z, including those related to political and civic engagement, and “civic pulse,” a continuous tracking survey that collects daily responses from Americans across the country about how they feel and what they care about, providing real time insights into community well-being and local engagement.
Despite the many challenges nationally, Bloomberg remains optimistic. “I am hopeful because I believe in the importance of community organizations; I think of them as the engine of sustainable change,” she says. “Local organizing, in communities, in neighborhoods, that’s where people can feel impact, and that impact is ultimately power.”
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