ANNUAL REPORT
2025

Not too long ago, I spoke with an organizer who shared that everything felt “out of focus”. In the years since COVID, since the chaotic baton toss from one administration to the next, “things”, the term she used to describe both the onslaught of information and her sense of what was possible anymore, felt unclear. Muddy. The world, and as a result her work, had become too noisy with static, distorting any sense of what matters or where to focus.

I think about this conversation a lot. We are capable of doing great things—of building and organizing and caring—but all of that work must be centered around the needs of our diverse, wonderful communities. Without understanding their evolving perspectives, hopes, and dreams and in an increasingly chaotic, information-laden world, the lack of clarity can make the work feel futile and hollow.

At Murmuration, we can’t quiet the noise. But we can help bring what matters most into focus.

And at Murmuration, we create that clarity by grounding ourselves in the four core practices of our work. We organize a network of organizations that together shape our country for the better. We provide insights that offer clarity and an always-on listening infrastructure that helps our partners understand how hope and anxiety evolve across the communities they serve. We create tools that make outreach easier and more effective. And we offer services that expand the capacity of our partners, ensuring they can meet the challenges of the moment.

We have never collectively experienced the true promise of America. But if I squint, I can see it—hovering just beyond the horizon, still within our reach. This sight, this hope is important. Hope matters. Hope serves a civic resource: people who hold onto it are more likely to participate in their communities, to stay engaged, and to believe their civic actions have meaning. Hope creates focus.

This year, I’ve found hope in the creativity and perseverance of our partners—organizers who are finding ways to reach their communities and strive for something better. Their work is hard and relentless and I am profoundly inspired by these groups who work every day to transform America into a nation where we can all thrive.

As you read this annual report, I hope you feel some of what I feel: gratitude for the community-led organizations who are changing what’s possible in America, a renewed sense of hope that change is within our reach, and clarity, as we collectively work to lift the fog impacting civic life enough to see clearly a path towards a better future.

Thank you for your support and for your belief in us,

Emma Bloomberg
Founder & CEO

Murmuration's insights are designed to power real change and meaningful community engagement. We equip partners with actionable intelligence through comprehensive sentiment, geographic, and behavioral studies, so they can better understand, connect with, and mobilize their communities. Our insights bring humanity back into the data and give organizers the ability to see the real story of America, not just the loudest one.

What does it feel like to live in America right now?

Are people hopeful about their future? Do they feel connected to their communities and trust the people around them? Do they believe their voices matter—or that the system is beyond their reach?

To understand the state of our democracy, we have to look beyond turnout rates and voting behavior. Civic life is shaped not only by how people vote, but by how they feel, what they care about, how connected they are to their communities, and whether they believe their voices matter.

Civic Pulse, our new daily research initiative, provides a real-time view into Americans’ lived civic experiences. In 2025, we surveyed 171,166 people, and continue to add ~500 new respondents each day.

To turn our Civic Pulse data into insights that shape civic life and guide organizing, we launched our Substack this year to bring together compelling stories and data-driven analysis that help readers deepen their understanding of how American civic life is evolving — and what that means for the future.

Building on Murmuration’s prior years of deep-dive research into Gen Z, as a powerful and emerging voting bloc, we released two new reports this year designed to equip our partners with actionable insights on how to better understand, connect with, and mobilize this generation.

How Mental Health Shapes Work, Outlook, and Community in Gen Z

Gen Z is confronting a mental health crisis that is reshaping how they work, build community, and view the world. This report offers a window into their lived experiences, revealing how emotional well-being intersects with perceptions of fairness, belonging, and success. The findings challenge assumptions about hard work, highlighting the value of nontraditional communities, and underscoring how hope is being redefined.

Gen Z's National Outlook — Cynicism, Fluidity, and Civic Energy

This report deepens our understanding of Gen Z and how to mobilize their energy to drive lasting change. Focused on their civic attitudes, behaviors, and outlook, the findings reveal a generation unmoored from traditional political affiliations and grappling with a profound sense of pessimism about the country’s direction. Yet, their disillusionment coexists with a desire for impact and authenticity. This report not only surfaces critical insights into Gen Z’s worldview, but also provides clear, actionable strategies to meaningfully connect with them—and activate their collective power for a more hopeful, engaged civic future.

Community organizing is hard work. We make it a little easier with tools designed for the real world that respect the fact that organizers and community members already have full lives, competing demands, and limited time. Our platform is easy to use and powerful, helping organizations quickly identify the people most likely to engage, understand the nuances of their communities, and translate those insights into action.

In 2025, Murmuration launched a new offering: services designed to deepen partners’ strategic capacity and strengthen their ability to build power in the communities they serve. With deep expertise in strategy, messaging, organizing, creative, and digital execution, this new offering expands what’s possible for the organizations we serve. We are now able to provide our partners with not only the infrastructure they rely on, but also the strategic capacity they need to spark deeper, more meaningful change.

We asked our Campaigns team, who provides these services, to share what they’ve learned over the past year working with those on the frontlines of community-led change.

1. Polling shifts power when you put it in front of power.

Polling data can be a tool that catches the eye of elected officials and their key staff. But too often, traditional polling is treated as a media product, released into the world and left to speak for itself. This year showed us that the real leverage comes from going directly to elected officials and key decision-makers. When insights are paired with intentional briefings and strategic guidance, it becomes a tool for shaping agendas, not just headlines.

2. Prioritize the "almost voters," not just the base.

In working with partners of all kinds of sizes, we see people’s frustration with the state of the country—rising costs, inflation, and economic anxiety—seeming to influence participation across all elections, including low-turnout municipal races, when people are messaged and engaged properly. These elections are decided at the margins, by campaigns that can expand the electorate—not persuade everyone. We saw that there is a reachable pool of lower-propensity voters who will show up in local elections when outreach is disciplined and connects pocketbook issues to local power. The strategic choice is to focus on the right voters in the right places. Our new local turnout model scores, built on hyper-local data, help organizers identify these people more effectively. Our takeaway was that turnout gains are largest, and impact is greatest, where candidates are already strong but participation has lagged.

3. Going direct: Substack and vertical video are no longer optional.

Increasingly the most effective content bypassed traditional gatekeepers and met people where they already are. We see Substack outperforming traditional email on open and engagement rates, while vertical video (TikTok, IG, and YouTube shorts) delivers reach and persuasion at scale - especially among younger and lower-propensity voting audiences. What we learned was that building direct channels gave partners more consistent engagement and far more control than relying on traditional media alone.

4. Coalitions beat silos in moments of shared pain.

People are hurting right now, and they’re finding safety in numbers. The strongest campaigns we saw or supported this year were neither narrowly transactional nor overly parochial. Rather, communities built coalitions across issues, sectors, and identities. When advocates align around shared material concerns, they gain credibility, resilience, and scale. Power grows faster when it’s built together.

5. Online reach matters—but durable power is still offline.

Digital engagement is the starting point, not the finish line. The most effective efforts this year intentionally moved people from online awareness into real-world action: meetings, canvasses, forums, and organizing spaces. Across our work, we saw that digital tools were strongest when they served as a bridge to belonging and offline action.

Murmuration works with organizations that refuse to accept the status quo, who believe that a better world is possible, and who roll up their sleeves and make it happen. They work across issues to solve our nation’s most pressing challenges, including housing, healthcare, criminal justice reform, economic mobility, cross-partisan collaboration, government corruption, election reform, education reform, and natural disaster recovery.

Rank The Vote is a nonprofit organization that is leading the charge to make election reform a reality across the country, by working to build grassroots support for ranked choice voting, a system that gives voters more freedom, more expression, and more power by letting people rank their candidates in order of preference. Their vision aims to create a political and social culture where elections are based on a competition of the best ideas rather than partisanship.

Through partnership with Murmuration, Rank The Vote leveraged our insights, tools, and services to better understand the impact of their work. During Charlottesville, Virginia’s first ranked choice voting election, one of their local partners wanted to know whether voters understood the new system. Using Murmuration’s cost-effective surveying tools, they conducted a representative post-election poll and found that 90% of voters felt confident using ranked choice voting and 80% wanted to continue using it. Equipped with this data, Rank The Vote could show policymakers and the public that voters not only understood the system but also embraced it.

“Murmuration enabled the ranked choice voting (RCV) movement to reach more people and win more effectively than ever this year with smart targeting. In Georgia, supporters stopped a ban bill dead in its tracks with a texting campaign leading to more than 10,000 emails sent to the House Elections Committee. In Boston, residents pushed an RCV Home Rule petition up near the top of the council's agenda, leading to its historic passage and approval by Mayor Michelle Wu. And campaigns including RCV and proportional representation ballot questions in Greenbelt, Maryland and Skokie, Illinois built public awareness and enthusiasm, and then got out the vote, using door knocking and texting campaigns driven by data from Murmuration’s Organizer and Atlas. Murmuration's partnership with Rank the Vote's network of state and local organizations is taking these and other homegrown, grassroots democracy initiatives to a whole new level.”

—Eileen Reavey
Executive Director, Rank the Vote

Collective Action for Youth, an organization that creates communities where all youth can thrive, partnered with Murmuration to support its GenHTX initiative, a coalition of BIPOC organizations working collaboratively to increase voter engagement among young people ages 35 and under in Houston, Texas.

Murmuration strengthened the coalition’s shared infrastructure by centralizing their outreach and engagement information across 38 different organizations and leading virtual and in-person trainings on our data and tools. We also built custom dashboards and heatmaps to highlight priority outreach areas by precincts to guide their engagement strategies, compare engagement across the coalition, and surface key insights after the election season was over.

Murmuration has been a huge help to our organization this year. First of all, the usability of the platform is extremely helpful. We have about 40 partner organizations that we have trained to use the Organizer platform. Organizer is very user friendly for both technologically savvy and less technologically inclined partners alike. It has allowed us to explore both organizing actions and the associated data much deeper than our program has been able to in previous years. Also, our partners at Murmuration have been incredibly helpful. They have worked closely with us to train our partners and create data-driven tools to help our program expand its reach.

—Alex Campbell
Data Manager, Collective Action for Youth

Courageous Colorado is a cross-partisan initiative working to reduce partisan divides, increase representation, and advance a forward-looking electoral reform agenda that reflects the needs of all Coloradans. With Murmuration’s data and hands-on support, Courageous Colorado was able to build statewide supporter lists gathered through their listening and activation tour. Murmuration worked closely with Courageous Colorado to help them organize the supporter data they gathered during their state-wide “activation tours,” showing their team how to clean and structure it in Organizer by Murmuration and set up a system for them to strategically stay in touch with the people they met on the road so that they could keep building real relationships with potential volunteers.

Murmuration helped us strengthen how we stay connected to our community at scale. It became the backbone of our email communications, allowing us to reach people consistently and follow up in thoughtful, organized ways. It also provided the infrastructure that supported our Activation Tour, as we visited more than 25 cities and towns in just six weeks—helping us track relationships, coordinate with local partners, and turn first conversations into ongoing collaboration. Together, that digital and in-person connectivity brought our work into sharper focus around what matters most: building real, durable relationships across the state.

—Jamie Engel
Founding Chief Partnership Officer, Courageous Colorado

Never has the work of fulfilling America's unrealized, unfulfilled promise felt more essential or more urgent. Making America a just, kind nation where all communities thrive and every person can lead a healthy, free, and dignified life feels more uncertain and more fragile than at any point in recent history. Right now, we have two incompatible visions of what America should be: we can retreat into the smallest, meanest version of who we have always been, or we can meet this moment with ambition and a commitment to transform America into the prosperous, diverse, and joyous nation we know is possible.

As we look to the next ten years and beyond, our goals are ambitious:

• Grow our network and become the premier resource for thousands of organizations working to create meaningful change in their communities.
• Continue to improve our products to meet the evolving needs of our partners by listening and actively engaging them—including the development of Explorer by Murmuration, our powerful interactive strategy tool.
• Offer more insights and research tools that empower our network to sharpen their strategies and allocate resources more effectively.

We are dedicated to ensuring the people and organizations committed to building thriving communities have the resources they need to succeed. We are excited and ready to grow, to listen, and to support community organizers as they lead the charge toward a more just and equitable society.

Murmuration Research Institute, Inc. Financials*

Murmuration, Inc. Financials*

As community organizers around the country navigate an ever-shifting civic landscape shaped by constant noise, rising distrust, and deepening fragmentation, discerning what matters has never been more important. This depth of understanding lies at the core of Murmuration's partners' successes and is essential to their work of igniting the civic imagination of communities to dream boldly and reshape the world around them.

With the support of our funders by our side, Murmuration is able to provide greater focus to community organizations across the country through our insights, tools, and services. Our work would not be possible without your commitment to our vision of transforming America into a nation where everyone thrives.