Middle Seat is a media and fundraising firm in the progressive space, running advocacy-based fundraising campaigns for dozens of clients at a time. Candidates, nonprofits, PACs, unions. Every client uses a different combination of tools, and every new engagement means another cumbersome round of manual data pulls and reports built from scratch.
They built a system on Civis Platform that changed how they work.
Dozens of clients on one system | Minutes to add a new client | 2x daily automatic data refreshes
"Every client uses a different combination of tools, and every new engagement meant another round of manual data pulls and reports built from scratch."
- Kenneth Pennington, Partner, Middle Seat
1. See all your channels in one place
Before Civis Platform, understanding performance meant logging into a different tool for every channel: one for donations, another for email, another for texts, another for ads. Now, all of it shows up in one dashboard, updated automatically. When you can see everything side by side, you can tell which channels are actually driving results and where to shift your budget.
2. One source of truth, not five
The real problem isn't dashboards. It's that every platform structures data differently, and someone has to force it all into the same format manually. To solve the problem, Middle Seat built a standardization layer on Civis Platform that converts raw data from any supported CRM into one consistent structure. It doesn't matter which tools a client uses. By the time data reaches a report, it all looks the same.
3. Less time on data, more time on strategy
Middle Seat's team was spending a significant chunk of its time pulling files and numbers, reformatting exports, and troubleshooting broken connections. That's time not spent on campaign strategy or the creative work that actually improves fundraising outcomes. Now the data pipeline runs itself, and when something unexpected is encountered, the team gets a Slack alert while the rest of the system keeps running.
4. Clients can check their own numbers
Middle Seat's dashboards are accessible to anyone with a link. No login, no license, no training. A client can check campaign performance anytime and see data that's at most a few hours old. Since checking performance is easy, people actually use it to make better targeting and media optimization decisions.
"A client can look at their dashboard without any obstacle. The dashboards are snappy and fast because we're loading a cached version of the data that updates twice a day."
- Kenneth Pennington, Partner, Middle Seat
5. Start small, scale fast
Middle Seat didn't build this overnight. They started with one client on one CRM, proved it worked, then made it reusable. Now they onboard new clients in minutes. You don't need a plan to unify everything at once. Start with the data that matters most to your team right now, get it into one place, and grow from there.
See it in action
Kenneth Pennington walked through their full setup with live demos in a recent webinar. Watch the recording on YouTube.
