The world's hottest startup factory is transforming the ACLU in powerful ways

pulse

May 10, 2017 4:09 PM

Since the election, the ACLU's membership has quadrupled, from 400,000 people to 1.6 million. Y Combinator is helping the nonprofit adapt.

Anthony Romero at TED.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has long been a force in American politics, but it wasn't always the kind of organization that came up in everyday conversation. After President Trump was inaugurated and attempted to block citizens of multiple Muslim-majority nations from traveling to the US, that all changed.

Since the election, the ACLU's membership has quadrupled,

"I'd always believed our members gave us money to put to use for programs. Things like tech and databases seemed like overhead, and so I kind of gave that less priority and poured more money into the litigation and the advocacy work," Romero said.

"And then I came to regret it, because all of a sudden my membership is quadrupling and I've got many more people to galvanize, and I've got a clunker of a [membership] database that doesn't really allow me to engage people in real time."

In early 2017, the ACLU officially joined Y Combinator. As one of a select number of nonprofits in the accelerator, it's taking a unique path through the startup school.

Instead of an investment (which is what for-profit startups get), it's receiving a $200,000 donation from Y Combinator. And while most startups send employees to join Y Combinator on-site, the accelerator embedded its people at ACLU headquarters in New York City.

Already, Y Combinator has helped the nonprofit make some significant tech upgrades.

The Y Combinator team has also helped the ACLU migrate its data onto an upgraded Salesforce CRM platform, and to figure out a fix for the email throttling issue.

As a result of the collaboration, the ACLU is planning a revamp of its whole IT department

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