What's New

Weekly updates from the Civly team — new features, improvements, and what we shipped.

April 19, 2026

Campaign Video Generator — New in War Room

End-to-end AI video creation for campaign attack and promo spots is now live in the War Room, replacing the old drawer UI with a dedicated Video tab.

  • Two-step editable script generation sourced from your Vault citations, so every claim in the spot is backed by research you already own
  • Test and Production modes with monthly credit limits — preview spots before burning credits on final renders
  • Automated imagery pulled from Pexels, Wikimedia Commons, your opponent’s social profiles saved to Vault, and cached TikTok, Instagram, and X screenshots
  • Video clips supported alongside still images on the timeline, with Ken Burns pan-and-zoom, pacing controls, add-scene, and a resizable config panel
  • Background music by mood (instrumental-only, FEC-safe) and text styling with color swatches, custom hex, size, position, and stroke
  • Manual image upload, Save to Vault, Past Videos list, and auto-applied FEC disclaimer plus AI-disclosure overlay on every export

FOIA War Room — Redesigned with AI Assistant

The FOIA experience is now a two-panel resizable layout with a chat assistant on the left and a jurisdiction sidebar on the right, replacing the old tabbed view.

  • AI chat assistant with starter prompts, OCR document context, and built-in FOIA legal knowledge — ask questions about your request or the law and get grounded answers
  • Multi-agency batch filing sends the same request to multiple agencies in one click
  • Federal plus all 50 states pre-loaded with statutes, deadlines, fee waivers, and appeal paths
  • Per-jurisdiction cost and turnaround estimates in the sidebar, with automatic cost estimation by scope (small / medium / large)
  • Deadline reminder emails 3 days before, day of, and 1 day overdue so nothing slips
  • Inline letter editing, document upload and download, send-test-email, and a reopen flow for follow-up requests
  • Entitlement-gated with a demo page at /foia for organizations that don’t have access yet

Fundraising — Donor Dedup, Civly Express, and Sanctions Screening

A major expansion of Fundraising covering donor deduplication, contribution limits, one-click giving, and compliance.

  • Per-campaign donor deduplication across different emails using a 5-signal score (name, phonetic match, city, employer, zip), so one donor across multiple inboxes rolls up to a single profile
  • FEC contribution-limit checks now aggregate across linked donor profiles, not per-email — no more accidental over-the-limit contributions from split profiles
  • Per-campaign state and federal contribution limits with different caps per race type, applied automatically
  • New Aggregate YTD column in the donations table and in CSV exports, plus donor cluster IDs and linked emails; backfilled across historical donations
  • Linked donor badge and tooltip in the UI, with a manual unmerge option for false positives
  • Civly Express: returning donors get saved payment methods for one-click giving
  • Daily OFAC SDN list screening — automatic sanctions check on every donation, refreshed each morning
  • Expense tracking tab with a Stripe fee breakdown, and a full donation export CSV with expanded columns
  • Multi-campaign data isolation on every fundraising query, so campaigns under the same org can’t see each other’s donors
  • IP geolocation now reads the real donor IP behind Cloudflare for accurate location-based checks

Big Book & Helios Chat — New Data, Claim Verification, and Inline Editing

Big Book gains a new consumer-complaints data source, deterministic quality safeguards on Short Books, and chat-driven editing from Helios.

  • CFPB Consumer Complaints added as a new Big Book section — 14.5M+ records searchable by employer, with top issues, products, untimely-response rate, and dispute rate
  • Claim Verification appendix on every Short Book classifies each Candidate Bio entry as Verified, Self-Reported, or Unverified, and points to the authoritative source to confirm (state bar, FINRA BrokerCheck, DD-214 FOIA, university registrar, and more) — directly addresses the Santos-style fabricated-bio risk
  • Priority Findings auto-appendix: any finding with a .gov, .mil, or CourtListener URL, or 3+ independent source URLs, is appended to every Short Book automatically — high-confidence material can’t get silently dropped
  • Citation Map fix restores four previously-missing sections (meeting minutes, dark web exposure, Reddit analysis, personality profile) in Short Book prose
  • Deterministic bibliography as a separate downloadable output — dedupes and classifies every source URL across the full report
  • Big Book pipeline upgraded to our latest research model, with instant rollback controls and automatic fallback if the primary model is unavailable
  • Completed Big Books now auto-save to Vault, and you can chat with any saved Big Book or Short Book directly from the Helios page
  • Helios chatbot can now edit the Short Book inline via tool use — the editor updates live and auto-saves
  • Vault context budget scales by plan tier — enterprise customers get more report content fed into each chat turn
  • Fetch reliability overhaul: smarter fallback ladder for source pages, per-book spend cap, shared circuit breaker to stop wasting time on rate-limited archives, and SEC and OSHA hardening
  • Fixed a 422 error that was breaking Big Book chat for some users, and silent Vault auto-save failures on completed books

Research Tools — New Tabs and Faster Person Search

  • New Social Media tab in the War Room — unified analysis embedded directly, pre-fills the target name, and results save to Vault and feed into chat
  • New PI Finder tab in People Finder: search licensed private investigators by state, city, and specialty; returns contact info and license numbers
  • Person Search now runs on a unified contributions table across every state and FEC — one query hits all jurisdictions, with parquet-backed results and a Postgres fallback for much faster large result sets
  • Better matching for committee names (PAC / committee vs. individual donor)
  • Apollo people search and email reveal restored for journalist search
  • Vault tab tag filtering and tag badges restored

Donor Prospecting — Philanthropic Giving (New)

Charitable giving now shows up alongside political giving on every donor profile.

  • Philanthropic profile card on donor detail pages covering charitable contributions
  • New “Has philanthropic gifts” filter in Donor Prospecting to surface $100K+ givers
  • Cross-source donor matching upgraded with probabilistic matching, LLM-assisted dedup, nickname and city normalization, and phonetic blocking — consolidated profiles across spelling and data-source variants

New and Expanded Data — 15.7 Million Records Added

The largest single-release data expansion to date, covering nonprofit filings, consumer complaints, and three new jurisdictions of campaign finance.

  • CFPB consumer complaints: 14,591,382 records (wired into Big Book as a new section)
  • San Francisco city campaign finance (1998–present): 486,059 contributions and 179,189 expenditures
  • Houston, TX city campaign finance (2020–2026 e-filings, including scanned PDFs): 111,851 contributions
  • Wyoming state campaign finance (ETL + UI + person search + parquet): 66,734 contributions
  • Philanthropic gifts unified table: 80,866 verified gifts from Million Dollar List, Forbes, 990 officers and PF contributors, and university and museum donor rolls — powers the new philanthropic profile card
  • IRS 990 Schedule I grants (nonprofits to other organizations): 138,067 new grants
  • IRS 990 GivingTuesday years 2011–2020 backfilled into the existing 990 tables (previously 2021+ only)

Reliability & Operations

  • State campaign finance weekly syncs moved to a dedicated fast queue — no longer starved by long-running FEC, SEC, LegiScan, and 990 jobs
  • Repaired silent ETL failures on MA, NE, GA, MI, and UT state campaign finance syncs that had been failing quietly for weeks; MA and NE reloaded 105K and 33K records, and GA / MI / UT self-heal on the next Sunday run
  • Memory-heavy tasks (parquet exports, mini-books, SMS, outreach, dialer, 990 parsing, and prospecting) moved to a dedicated high-memory worker pool
  • Bulk parquet exports no longer time out on large datasets, with a 4-hour window, atomic writes, and auto-detected column types
  • ETL status emails now correctly report “partial” when any table fails (previously misreported as “success”)
  • Rolling deployments of the Fundraising service no longer double-send donation emails
  • Enterprise customers are now auto-granted all enterprise-only features — no more manual toggling
April 12, 2026

Big Book — 8 New Data Sources and Automated Quality Checks

Opposition research reports now draw from eight additional public record databases, with a new verification engine that flags unsupported claims and broken links before delivery.

  • Glassdoor employer reviews for campaign committees surface staff treatment, workplace culture, and management red flags from people who actually worked on the campaign
  • IRS 990 nonprofit filings now included, with officer and director names, titles, and detailed compensation breakdowns from Schedule J
  • FARA foreign agent registrations pull from the DOJ database, showing foreign principals, registered agents, and lobbying activity tied to your subject
  • OGE 278e financial disclosures cover Senate-confirmed Presidential appointees — assets, income sources, and potential conflicts of interest
  • SBA PPP loan records — 12 million loans searchable by name and state, surfacing forgiveness amounts and business connections
  • LD-203 lobbying contribution reports show political contributions made by registered lobbyists to or on behalf of your subject. All lobbying data has also been migrated to the new lda.gov API ahead of the legacy system’s June 2026 sunset
  • Mobilize campaign event monitoring tracks opponent ground-game activity — canvassing, phone banks, and rallies — within 150 miles of the state capital
  • Automated citation verification cross-references every source link in the report, flagging homepage redirects, broken URLs, and uncited factual claims before the report reaches you

Local Government Meeting Minutes — CivicClerk Added

A third meeting minutes data source is now live alongside Legistar and Municode, expanding municipal coverage with automated weekly collection.

  • CivicClerk adds 11 new municipalities with AI-powered minutes parsing to surface relevant policy decisions and public comments

Command Center — AI Research with Live Data Access

The Command Center now connects directly to 17+ live data sources. Ask questions in plain English and get verified answers with charts, tables, and citations — no file uploads required.

  • Instant sessions: click “New Session” and start asking questions immediately — the AI figures out which database to query based on your question
  • 17 searchable data categories including Congress members, voting records, state legislation, campaign finance, FEC contributions, stock trades, court records, election results, government contracts, EPA compliance, OSHA inspections, PPP loans, meeting minutes, and local legislation
  • Research tab runs on-demand Helios deep research without leaving your session, with results feeding directly into the conversation
  • Smart cross-linking connects your questions to other Civly tools — social media profiles link to Social Media Analysis, journalists link to People Finder, and donor questions link to Donor Prospecting
  • Campaign Video Generator creates campaign-ready video ads with AI-generated scripts, two-step editing, and automatic FEC disclaimer and AI disclosure compliance
  • Data Sources overview shows every database available to the AI with example questions for each
  • Rebuilt query engine delivers faster, more accurate results backed entirely by Civly’s verified data

Reliability Improvements

  • Twitter and FEC data sources now handle missing profiles and empty records gracefully instead of interrupting report generation
  • LinkedIn profile discovery is more accurate, with better URL validation and improved fallback behavior
  • Removed two data sources that were no longer functional to keep reports clean and accurate
  • Reports now run up to 3 concurrently for faster turnaround during peak usage
April 5, 2026

Helios Deep Research — Editable Reports, QA, and Political Ads

Research reports are no longer read-only. You can now edit any section directly in a rich text editor before exporting.

  • Edit reports with a full WYSIWYG editor, leave inline comments, and track changes so your team can review and refine together
  • Built-in QA automatically flags unsupported claims, missing citations, and gaps in coverage so nothing slips through
  • Export in three formats: a full Comprehensive report, a Brief executive summary, or a Vulnerability Scan with opposition-ready highlights
  • Political ad spending from Google and Meta is now woven into campaign history, donor research, controversy, and media analysis — drawing from 19,500 advertisers, 1.5 million ad creatives, and 2.4 million spend records
  • Political email archives from politicalemails.org are now included as a research source, filtered to emails actually sent by the subject
  • Every Deep Research page now includes a methodology section listing all public data sources with links and explaining how they’re cross-referenced
  • New city-level targeting and free-text context fields let you narrow reports to specific jurisdictions or policy areas

Court Records Search (New)

Search across 10 million federal court opinion clusters in one place, with filters for court, judge, and keywords.

  • A dedicated search page lives under Background Research with severity badges, sortable columns, and source type indicators
  • Court Records tabs now appear on both federal and state person search profiles
  • Results combine our local database with live CourtListener API docket searches for broader coverage
  • Fast fuzzy matching on 10 million case names so you can find what you need even with partial or approximate terms

Local Government Meeting Minutes — 80 New Municipalities (93 Total)

We expanded meeting minutes coverage from 13 to 93 municipalities, pulling from three data sources: Legistar, Municode Meetings, and CivicClerk.

  • 59 new Legistar municipalities added through automated discovery and validation
  • Municode Meetings API adds a second source for meeting minutes
  • CivicClerk API adds a third source covering 119 portals with 164,000 events, 98,000 minutes PDFs, and 32,000 video recordings
  • All sources are scraped on a weekly automated schedule so data stays fresh
  • 8 new high-value SLEA municipalities added: Detroit, Genesee County, Cumberland County, Guilford County, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Wilmington, and Arapahoe County

Entitlements and Access Changes

  • Voting Records, SEC Explorer, Election Explorer, and Congress Trades are now free for all users
  • Compliance and FEC Filing now require entitlements, with a demo page for organizations that don’t have access yet
  • Organizations can now have monthly book generation limits for enterprise plans
March 29, 2026

Big Book — Faster Reports, Deeper Research

Opposition research reports now generate faster and pull from more sources.

  • Report generation no longer slows down during peak usage, with dedicated infrastructure for the heaviest queries
  • Federal court records now included: lawsuits, legal proceedings, and case severity are automatically surfaced in career, financial, and controversy sections
  • More reliable LinkedIn and Facebook data collection with upgraded scraping infrastructure

Judicial Intelligence (New) — 22.7 Million Records

Comprehensive federal judge research available across the platform, built on one of the largest legal datasets we’ve integrated.

  • 10.7 million court opinions linked to 10 million opinion clusters for full case law coverage
  • Judge financial disclosures for 32,500+ filings, broken out across 2 million+ line items: investments (1.9M), positions (37K), agreements (10K), debts (18.8K), gifts (2K), reimbursements (33.5K), non-investment income (15.3K), and spousal income (20.2K)
  • Judge profiles with biographical data, appointment history, and court assignments from the Federal Judicial Center
  • All data cross-referenced into unified judge profiles and searchable opinions for quick lookup

Local Government Meeting Minutes (New) — 201,000+ Records

AI-powered scraping and analysis of local government meetings, surfacing relevant policy decisions and public comments. Currently covering 13 municipalities with 5,000+ meetings, 189,000 agenda items, and 7,300 public statements parsed.

State Personal Financial Disclosures (New) — 44,700 Filings

Look up elected officials’ personal financial disclosure filings at the state level, starting with North Carolina.

State Campaign Finance — 18 New Jurisdictions (33 Total) — 15.6 Million Records

More than doubled coverage with full search, filters, and an AI research assistant for each. Total state campaign finance database now includes 12.9 million contribution records and 2.7 million expenditure records.

  • Utah, Hawaii, West Virginia, Maine, Dallas, LA City, Oregon, Idaho, Philadelphia, DC, Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, Missouri, New York City, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Nebraska

Donor Prospecting — Instant Search

Prospecting is now real-time instead of batch. Results appear instantly as you search.

  • Save individual donors or an entire result set to your CRM in one click
  • Filter by donor type and mobile phone availability
  • Stats banner showing total enriched records across your database
  • Already-saved contacts are automatically excluded so you only see new prospects

CRM Enhancements

  • Contribution history now visible on contact profiles so you can see giving patterns before reaching out

Power Dialer

  • Calls now come from local area codes, automatically purchasing numbers as needed for better pickup rates

Coming Soon: SMS Campaigns

Text message outreach with AI-personalized messages, local area code sending, TCPA compliance, and CRM integration. Work is underway.

March 22, 2026

Big Book — More Data, Smarter Analysis

The opposition research report now pulls from significantly more sources and delivers deeper insights.

  • Five new data sources: state campaign finance records, congressional net worth, congressional stock trades, state legislation, and Reddit activity
  • Instagram image analysis with two-tier controversy detection
  • Big Five personality scoring from social media posts with evidence citations
  • Support for multiple social handles per platform (e.g., campaign + personal accounts both get scraped)
  • Full Substack article content now included instead of just previews
  • Improved reliability: fixed silent section failures so no data gets quietly dropped

Power Dialer

A built-in calling tool for donor outreach.

  • AI-personalized call scripts generated per contact
  • Generate-and-review flow so you can edit scripts before calling
  • Funnel view showing contact progression through outreach stages
  • Contact history and call activity tracking
  • Followup email sending after calls
  • Script editing and customization

Civly Connect CRM — Continued Build-Out

New capabilities layered onto the CRM.

  • Google Calendar integration: schedule and automate donor meetings directly from contact profiles
  • Bulk enroll contacts into email sequences from the contacts list
  • Sequence stage visibility on contact detail pages
  • Toolbar filter bar on contacts list for quick filtering
  • Email sequences and Power Dialer work together for automated multi-channel followup
  • Auto-unenroll contacts from sequences on bounce, spam complaint, or unsubscribe

State Campaign Finance — 6 New States (15 Total)

Expanded from 9 states to 15 with full ETL, API, AI chat, and frontend for each.

  • Oklahoma, Iowa, New York, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and New Jersey added
  • Each state includes searchable contribution data, filters by occupation/employer/state, and an AI chat assistant

People Search — Expanded Coverage

Building on the unified profile with additional data and state-level records.

  • State person search with voting, finance, and pay-to-play data
  • Async pay-to-play analysis with net worth tab and name alias support
  • Pay-to-play narrative summaries with contract details

Contact Enrichment — Addresses & Phone Numbers

Find mailing addresses and phone numbers for donors at scale.

  • Batch address lookup and enrichment from the prospecting pipeline
  • AI-powered address search integrated into donor profiles
  • Voter registration data feeding into address matching
  • AI-powered phone search and validation for better contact coverage
  • Webhook-based enrichment for real-time phone number capture

Polling & Race Tracker

  • Race catalog expanded to 60 races with full coverage
  • Email notifications when new polling data syncs
  • Improved daily polling check that scans the full catalog

Mobile App

  • Early-stage mobile app with authentication and core navigation in place
March 16, 2026

Civly Connect — Your Built-in CRM

A brand new contact management system right inside Civly. No more switching to HubSpot or spreadsheets.

  • Contacts list with search, filters by status, and source tracking
  • Contact detail pages with notes, activity history, and tasks
  • Donor dossiers on contact profiles showing giving history, party alignment, key topics, news, and personality insights
  • Auto-sync with Prospecting: save a donor and they become a CRM contact automatically
  • Bulk import from saved prospects, dossiers, or CSV files

Unified Social Media Analysis

One tool to search and analyze social media across Facebook, Truth Social, YouTube, and more.

  • Search by person or by topic across platforms
  • Get a briefing-style summary highlighting cross-platform themes
  • Save analyses to your vault with citations for later reference

People Search — State and Federal Data in One Place

A unified profile pulling together state and federal records:

  • Federal profiles with five tabs: voting record, FEC contributions, stock trades, election history, and pay-to-play
  • State campaign finance data from 7 states (AL, CA, CO, MI, NC, PA, TX) alongside federal FEC records
  • Party alignment percentages and improved committee lookups using FEC candidate linkage

Briefing Room Improvements

  • Action cards now display relevant images alongside each briefing item, making it easier to scan and recognize stories at a glance
  • Improved image quality: filtered out low-resolution cached thumbnails so you only see clear, relevant visuals
  • Better fallback handling when images aren't available, so cards still look clean

Simplified Help and Chat

The individual chatbots from across the platform are now consolidated into a single help button on the side of the screen. One chat widget, available from any page, that adjusts to where you are and what you need help with.

March 8, 2026

Donor Intelligence & Prospecting

  • Donor Intelligence Hub: unified view of enriched donors with dossier generation, chat, and social posts
  • Contact Finder pipeline with Civly enrichment, weighted party scoring, and web search fallback
  • Saved contacts with save/unsave, bulk save, and enrichment status tracking
  • Mini Book dossier generation with citations, sources, personality traits, and AI chat interface
  • Bulk dossier generation for batch processing hundreds of donors at once

Pay-to-Play Analysis

  • Government contracts command center: cross-reference 10.6M federal contracts against campaign donors
  • Narrative summary with expandable donor and contract details
  • Committee typeahead search across FEC and state campaign finance data

State Campaign Finance

  • Colorado TRACER campaign finance ETL with contributions, expenditures, and classification
  • Donor data cleaning pass 2: suffix stripping, regex employer junk detection, and SQL helper functions
  • Donor classification: persistent person/committee/unknown type on 6.4M+ donor profiles
  • Pre-computed sub-matviews for 10x faster donor profile rebuilds

State Legislation

  • Expanded to all 50 states (added 32 states including NY, IL, NJ, WA, OR, CT, MA, MD, and more)
  • 10x faster matview rebuilds with single-pass unified JOIN strategy

Race Tracker

  • Race tracker with 60+ races from RealClearPolitics coverage
  • Poll data with pollster details, sample sizes, and candidate spreads

Research & Intelligence

  • Content scorer with research-backed criteria and dual-audience clarify flow
  • Bill topic classifier, legislator scoring, and profile cards
  • Substack full article fetcher via slug API
  • Social discovery with inline Serper API search

Platform

  • Dark theme support with toggle
  • Issue submission form with screenshot upload
  • Improved CSV export error handling across all features
  • Learning Center guides for YouTube Analysis with annotated screenshots
February 28, 2026

State Campaign Finance

  • Texas campaign finance: 34M+ contributions and 5M expenditures searchable with filters
  • Michigan campaign finance with ML-powered occupation and employer classification
  • Alabama and North Carolina campaign finance data with AI chat analysis
  • California campaign finance models and ETL pipeline
  • Cascading filter options and autocomplete across all state finance tables

Government Data

  • Congressional stock trade explorer with Senate eFD scraper (2021–2026)
  • House financial disclosure parser with OCR fallback for scanned PDFs (2014–2020)
  • State legislation expanded to 19 states (added TX, VA, IA, CO, MN, NH, NV, SC + session backfills)
  • Browsable federal votes table with column-header filters
  • Election explorer with searchable column-header filters

Research & Intelligence

  • Big Book: government contracts pay-to-play analysis
  • War Room: dedicated Polling tab with custom configuration

Learning Center

  • New Learning Center with per-feature step-by-step guides
  • Annotated screenshots with highlights for Social Media Analysis and Research War Room

Performance & Reliability

  • Materialized view auto-ANALYZE after refresh for consistent query performance
  • Centralized matview refresh utility with SEC matview support
  • Optimized social alerts dashboard and briefing loading
  • Deploy gate for concurrent development session safety
February 19, 2026

Research & Analysis

  • Multi-state legislation support: California, Vermont, and Alabama
  • Unified Instagram and TikTok video analysis with AI-powered filtering
  • Interest group scorecard ratings for legislators

Data & Intelligence

  • Redesigned FEC Explorer with server-side pagination and aggregate totals
  • SEC insider trading details and red flag detection
  • Cross-platform topic tracking and Reddit trending detection

Collaboration & Workflow

  • Shared vault with full transcripts and article content in saves
  • War Room citations resolve to clickable links
  • Chat links open in new tab with smarter currency formatting

Platform & Security

  • Two-factor authentication and Azure AD login support
  • Rate limiting and access control hardening
  • Upgraded AI models and faster data pipelines
February 8, 2026

Social Alerts

  • Automated refresh pipelines with configurable auto-refresh per person or topic
  • Bulk refresh to update all tracked entities at once
  • Live progress indicators showing collection and analysis status on each card
  • Consolidated digest emails — one summary per refresh cycle instead of per-alert
  • Per-user trending detection so every user receives their own trending alerts

Big Book (Opposition Research)

  • Upgraded AI models for higher quality research and writing

Social Media Analysis

  • Faster, more efficient data pipelines for Reddit and Substack monitoring

Platform Reliability

  • Smarter AI retry logic with automatic model fallback during high-traffic periods
  • Improved background worker architecture for faster, more stable alert processing
February 1, 2026

Big Book (Opposition Research)

  • Deep research now pulls LinkedIn, Wikipedia, MIT Election Data, and property records
  • Choose a political angle (left, right, primary challenge, or neutral) for framed research
  • Enhanced AI models for higher quality writing
  • Hyperlinked citations, Wikipedia sources, and full bibliography
  • New sections: political donations, property records, Truth Social, Path to Victory
  • Professional prose formatting; better support for lesser-known candidates

Social Alerts

  • Monitor up to 10 candidates across YouTube, Substack, and more
  • AI-categorized alert severity with review/dismiss/escalate workflow

Data Breach Check

  • Screen individuals against known data breaches

Election History & Explorer

  • Browse historical election results and explore race/candidate data

FEC & Campaign Finance

  • PAC contributions view in FEC Committee Explorer
  • AI-powered queries for more accurate data lookups

Social Media Analysis

  • Toggle to include/exclude replies; advanced Twitter search with auto-retry
  • Facebook public page scraping for Big Book research

Command Center MCP

  • MCP server lets external AI tools interact with Civly's research capabilities
January 26, 2026 — Launch

Map political networks, flag controversial content, and generate professional reports in minutes.