By Elainna Ciaramella
You’d think political campaigns would be high-tech and sophisticated, but before Proximity, they resembled outdated and haphazard systems more than anything else. So what is proximity? It’s a comprehensive campaign management platform created by Becki Wright, who saw a desperate need for an overhaul while personally working on campaigns.
Proximity gives users all the tools they need to run their campaigns successfully. For example, if someone new to the campaigning world decides to run for office and doesn’t know where to start, they enter the platform and, through guided questions, begin to consider things they may not have known, they are informed. dates, deadlines and requirements.
Wright attended Brigham Young University and earned his Masters in Public Administration from the University of Utah. While Wright was working on his master’s degree, he began working for Friends of the Great Salt Lakewhere his attention turned to education, advocacy, membership and fundraising, and soon Wright was doing advocacy work for additional organizations.
Wright ended up helping a friend run for political office and developed a taste for campaign work. She then continued working in legislative advocacy for the PTA and served on the Utah PTA Legislative Advocacy Committee (LAC).
The turning point
In 2015, Wright ran for Centerville City Council and lost by 11 votes. That campaign was one of the key moments that inspired Wright to start Proximity. He recognized that many of the resources he needed simply did not exist. Although Wright was getting help and assistance from other people who had come forward, and was drawing on his own experience from previous campaigns, he noticed that people were running campaigns from a Google spreadsheet.
“I thought to myself, ‘There’s just got to be a better way,'” Wright says. “As that idea started to form in my brain, I went out and did a lot of fundraising for community and I found that I was really successful at raising funds and making connections.”
In 2021, Wright heard Becky Edwards was running for the United States Senate, someone Wright had followed since Edwards was elected to the Utah state House of Representatives. In the Utah Legislature, Edwards was not technically Wright’s representative, but Wright was impressed by Edwards’ involvement and transparency in sharing what was happening on the Hill. Wright used Edwards as an example to help people in his neighborhood understand what was happening on the Hill and in his small Centerville community.
“When I heard Edwards was running, I told him I’d love to help with his campaign, and he said, ‘Great, we need a CFO,’ and that’s where I went,” Wright says.
When Wright started Proximity, he had worked on several small-scale state campaigns and larger campaigns such as the Exploratory Committee and Becky Edwards’ senate campaign. Those campaigns opened Wright’s eyes, and he realized, “Wow, inefficiencies really happen at all levels.” The tools and resources to run effective campaigns simply did not exist. “I was using six different programs on Becky’s campaign, and none of them were talking to each other,” Wright says.
Wright continued: “Becky’s campaign was sophisticated: we needed efficiency and collaboration between different teams, but also between the resources that provided data for each system or process. We needed the various data to appear in other parts of the system, but there weren’t any platforms that could do that, so this pain point helped me realize that the operations of a campaign need to be centralized. They need to give a comprehensive view of things and make sure that all these different systems talk to each other.”
Enter Proximity.
Wright told TechBuzz News that he had been thinking about Proximity for several years, during which he mapped out the essential elements of Proximity in his mind. MVP—and what was needed a lot to help the candidates.
In October 2022, Wright began researching local development shops and asked friends in the tech space who had been CTOs to introduce her to software developers. After reviewing different developers, Wright landed incredible because their leadership team said, “You’re not a technical founder, but you actually know what you’re talking about.” They recognized her as a subject matter expert and said, “Okay, let’s solve these problems.”
Wright created Proximity as a public benefit corporation like Utah-based Cotopaxi, also known as a “B Corp.” Public benefit corporations have a dual bottom line and the desire to make money and do good. “I intentionally built Proximity as a public benefit corporation because I am passionate about removing barriers to people’s entry into political leadership, improving voter literacy, and spurring campaign innovation,” Wright says.
Altering archaic campaign processes
“The way campaigns are done is an archaic process because there hasn’t been much innovation in recent years,” he says. “In so many other industries, you see this innovation. You see technology leading the way, solving problems and making people’s lives easier, but in politics and campaigns, that hasn’t happened.”
According to Wright, when technical innovation occurs, it is in a politicized way. That is, it is either a progressive set of tools or a conservative set of tools. The races Proximity is designed for are largely non-partisan, such as municipal races, which include city council, school board, county and mayor.
“Candidates don’t have tools or resources, and many of these people entering the race, it’s their first time, so they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know what tools they need to do it,” Wright says.
Wright developed Proximity to address issues she saw in the campaigns she worked on, and that includes her role as CFO of the sophisticated Senate campaign. In the Senate campaign, her role involved a lot of fundraising and reporting that information in a way that could be used by the candidate.
Reflecting on his campaign work, Wright spoke of the importance of strategy. “In the middle of campaigns, things change quickly,” says Wright. “Running a campaign is like creating a startup: going from zero to 60 in a matter of months. You’re expected to create something, but also be very nimble and ready to pivot when the need arises.”
If the candidate doesn’t have data to talk to each other, and they don’t have the tools that give them a clear idea of what’s going on in the campaign, they can’t pivot and they can’t use it to their advantage. . “I really wanted to allow the candidate to have a clearer understanding of what’s going on in the campaign — where they’ve been effective, and then where they might need to strengthen their efforts.”
Proximity offers tailored tools for candidates
Simply put, Proximity’s platform offers tailor-made tools for political candidates, giving them a distinct “data edge.” Platform features include donation processing, voter mapping and financial reporting, providing essential campaign data in one place.
“One thing we’re implementing is our AI campaign manager,” says Wright. “It’s an important component for smaller campaigns, which are often one-run campaigns where the candidate is alone, pounding the pavement by himself, trying to make things happen.” It’s called CLAIM (Campaign Logistics Artificial Intelligence Manager). For users to be successful in their campaigns, they can use AI to look at system data and make decisions based on that information.
In the future, Proximity plans to incorporate texting and use the AI component with survey responses, further helping the candidate guide strategy. Additionally, they plan to add demographic data to the platform as a complementary feature for customers.
Proximity’s target customers for 2023 are municipal candidates. The candidate can potentially share the username, but it is a single user platform for 2023 as Proximity develops, develops, gets more users and receives more feedback. In the future, Proximity will have a multi-user system that will grant different permissions and levels of availability for different modules.
So far, Proximity has booted. “I’ve had requests to invest and I’ve said ‘not yet’ because I think you have to be really strategic when you take money,” explained Wright.
“I’ve been looking forward to monitoring how the app is developing and also keeping that participation as high as possible. That being said, I’m raising a raise to be able to bring Proximity to the nation. We’re hitting a lot of small campaigns and to do that , we have to scale at a great rate; we’re gearing up for a surge so we can get there.”
The submission period for the 2023 election opens on June 1 and runs from June 1-7, so with a May 30 launch date, Proximity will be there when candidates need them.
Elainna Ciaramella is a business journalist and writer living in St. george Elainna interviews business owners, researchers, university leaders and managers from all over the country. His curiosity is endless and he is constantly searching for information that will intrigue and inspire readers.
