On Saturday, April 27, along with a coordinated nation-wide day of organizing, the Bernie Sanders 2020 Presidential Campaign launched a piece of technology they are calling “Bern.” Bern has a lot of similarities to Reach and there has been a good deal of confusion and questions among Reach users and Bernie supporters so we wanted to post some clarifying information here.
Bern is not Reach.
We are flattered that Bern adopts of a lot of the core ideas and organizing principles behind Reach, but it was built independently of Reach. Many of the folks on the Bernie campaign’s organizing team (up to the highest levels of leadership) have used Reach in the past on various other campaigns and are some of our most enthusiastic supporters and advocates. In fact, on this very website, you’ll find endorsement quotes from folks who are now on Bernie’s staff.
The Bernie campaign was in a uniquely highly-resourced position and they made the decision that instead of using Reach, they wanted to hire their own developers and build their own Reach-like app in-house. That is what they launched. This tool is Bernie-only and, according to their campaign, will not ever be sold to other campaigns.
We are excited that so many campaigns around the country including the dozens of campaigns using Reach and the Bernie campaign have all come to the same conclusion that a core component of any modern organizing effort is an app like Reach.
We are very proud of what we are building here at Reach and we believe that after nearly a year of development, refinement, optimization, and user feedback from activists and organizers around the country, our app offers the absolute best-in-class user experience for progressive people-powered campaigns looking to fully harness volunteer energy and meet voters, literally, where they are. We are currently live on campaigns across the country at every scale from school board to presidential races and have a lot of exciting new features coming soon.
If you are a Bernie supporter who thinks you and your fellow organizers could have more success if the campaign was using Reach rather than Bern, feel free to email [email protected] and let them know. If you are working on another progressive campaign that could benefit from this sort of app, let’s get you started!
