OpenSecrets announces investment by Leadership Now Project

The Center for Responsive Politics is pleased to announce it has been awarded an investment by members of the Leadership Now Project which will help to turbo-charge the essential money-in-politics information on our website, Opensecrets.org.

With less than one year to go before the 2020 election, it is more important than ever to maintain a nonpartisan source for reliable data and analysis in order to best inform the public, journalists and other advocates and nonprofit organizations working to strengthen democracy. OpenSecrets provides essential data infrastructure to understand our system of governance and the growing influence of money in politics.

With funding from groups like Leadership Now, OpenSecrets has been able to expand its resources since the 2016 election, updating key areas of the site and introducing new features and tools to help the public follow the money in Washington and beyond. Updated features include our federal lobbying database, offering new tools for examining trends in spending. New features include a tool tracking political spending at properties owned by the Trump Organization, the Foreign Lobby Watch tool which allows users to track foreign influence spending, a home for relevant featured data sets that allows for quick access to data behind trending topics of the day and a tool that tracks political ad spending using data acquired from the FCC.

We have also expanded our tracking of campaign finance to include demographic data relating to race and gender for 2018 – and soon, 2020 – candidates, demographics of Congress going back decades and the gender breakdown of each 2020 presidential candidate's donors.

In addition to our reports on gender, OpenSecrets has also published reports relating to the rise of “shadow lobbying” and the international business interests of President Trump.

“The Center for Responsive Politics is excited about the wealth of information we will be able to share on OpenSecrets.org because of this investment from Leadership Now,” says Sheila Krumholz, the Center’s Executive Director. “We are committed to creating money in politics data that is nonpartisan, fair, accurate, and removed from any political agenda. This support allows us to power our collaborations with media partners and the nonprofit community who rely on our data, and to better inform American voters about their choices.”

The Leadership Now Project is a membership organization of business and thought leaders who are committed to long-term solutions to renew American democracy. Incubated in 2017 by a group of Harvard Business School alumni, the organization today has member groups in five cities and is growing rapidly.

Nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit, the Center for Responsive Politics is the nation's premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy. Founded in 1983, CRP’s vision is for Americans to be empowered by access to clear and unbiased information about money’s role in politics and policy and to use that knowledge to strengthen our democracy.