Candidate recruitment CRM

The team at Trestle Collaborative created a purpose-built CRM for Run For Something, an organization that recruits and supports democrats under 35 running for office for the first time. No product on the market met the unique needs for tracking candidate recruitment in the political space, and the CRM solution is currently being adopted by other organizations that support candidates running for office, including state parties

Run for Something faced difficult internal problems around a single source of truth for data related to the candidates they endorse and support as they run for office. They were tracking some candidate relationship information in a dated custom system and using an Airtable for tracking applicants in the pipeline. Additionally, the team tasked with supporting candidates was relying on a confusing and error-prone spreadsheet for goal tracking and a cumbersome and repetitive Google form for tracking their interactions with candidates. Additionally, there was no clear place for the marketing and social media team to be able to search for and find the full story on specific candidates or groups of candidates that the organization wanted to highlight or amplify.

We started this project with a discovery sprint - meeting with users across Run For Something to learn more about their specific pain points. We also conducted interviews with other organizations who do candidate recruitment to surface similarities and differences in workflows and pain points so that we could build a solution that could be used more broadly in the space. We also collected data sets from Run For Something and all of the organizations we spoke to in order to map the data to our new data model and plan fields and a structure that could scale well across different use cases.

We took the requirements gathered from Run For Something and what we learned from the research to wireframe and test initial concepts. We then iterated and got regular feedback from individual stakeholders and large groups in workshop settings throughout the design and implementation process until all users successfully migrated over into the new system and workflow and RFS was able to deprecate their old systems.