About Follow the Money
Campaign finance data is technically public but practically invisible. We're changing that by making political money flows personal, visual, and shareable.
The Problem
Every dollar contributed to a political campaign is a public record. But that data is scattered across dozens of government databases, formatted for compliance rather than comprehension, and practically inaccessible to the average citizen.
The result? The money flowing through American politics is technically transparent but effectively invisible to the people it affects most.
Our Approach
- 1.Personal first. Start with your zip code, your representatives. National data is secondary.
- 2.Visual, not textual. Money flows are shown as networks and relationships, not spreadsheets.
- 3.Non-partisan by design. We expose the system equally. The data speaks for itself.
- 4.Radically transparent methodology. Every number traces to source data. See our methodology page.
- 5.Shareable by default. Every insight generates a designed, branded artifact you can share.
Why It Matters
of Americans worry about wealthy lobbyists' influence
believe campaign donations lead to corruption
think the government is run by a few big interests
Current Scope
This MVP covers all current federal officials — 535 House members and 100 Senators. We show contribution data from the 2023-2024 election cycle sourced from FEC filings.
State and local officials, lobbying data, voting records, and more are planned for future releases.
Open Source
Follow the Money is built in the open. Our data processing scripts, methodology, and application code are available for review. Transparency about our own process is as important as the transparency we provide about political money.