Alex Pedersen
Pedersen (left) and Mastronardi say Polco offers government officials a way to get resident feedback.
Nick Mastronardi is baffled by the ways small governments try to engage constituents. “It’s crazy. They’re pursuing so many fractured communication channels, like landline use, when most younger people are just on cellphones,” Mastronardi says. “They’ll do postcard or email surveys and send out maybe 10,000 of those, but like 10 people respond.”
And even when governments try digital media, they fail to grasp how it works. “They’ll try to message through Facebook or Survey Monkey, where it could be one person taking the survey with 10 different accounts,” Mastronardi says. Overall, he adds, “It leaves citizens confused about where to participate, so they just don’t.”
Convinced he knew a better way, Mastronardi quit his job at Amazon in May 2015 and founded Polco, a crowdsourcing company that he hopes will encourage greater citizen participation in local government.
Polco creates web-based surveys for municipalities so constituents can give input without having to show up to a meeting. The polls are created in the form of a widget, which can be displayed on any website. Information about a possible new homeless shelter, for example, could have the poll running alongside it, asking residents whether they support the proposal. Polco then collects the data and presents the information to officials.
Mastronardi founded the company in Texas but moved with it to Madison a year later. “With the university and the Capitol, and the young people wanting to get more engaged, and a good tech community, it’s just the perfect place for what we’re doing,” he says.
He argues that his company will save governments time and money by replacing outdated or unreliable methods of getting resident feedback. His company addresses a persistent problem for democracies — how to get people engaged. When people don’t get involved, he says, it skews the input officials get.
Alex Pedersen, Polco’s chief operating officer, says this dynamic played out around the country in cities he researched. The effect is so common, in fact, that the nickname STPs — same 10 people — has become commonplace among municipal officials.
“It’s generally the same people every week [at local government meetings] — they’re extremely passionate and tend to disproportionately influence policies,” Pedersen says.
“They may not be representative of everyone else, and an absence of knowing those other opinions results in decisions being made off of those few people.”
In Dane County, Polco may offer people more access to government, says county clerk Scott McDonell. For residents of a relatively large county, making the long drive to a county board meeting in Madison can be a challenge, he says.
“A county government doesn’t get the attention in the media that a city or national government does, and that’s always been a source of frustration for us,” McDonell says. “We have an almost $600 million budget annually and a desire to engage the public in a rather large county. Any way that we can reach people and solicit information — that’s something we’re striving for.”
Dane County has done a “soft launch” with the platform, asking residents questions about homeless services, borrowing for a new jail, and whether officials should research the effects of the state’s new voter ID requirement. But McDonell doesn’t expect the county to fully incorporate the platform on its website until after the November election.
Mastronardi says he hopes to eventually broaden Polco to the private sector and, and eventually, scale internationally.
“The main goal is to just get people involved,” he says. “A more informed [public] really leads to better public policy.”
