In the year since our last grab-bag update, we’ve gotten a truly incredible amount of work done. In essence, your reaction to the last presidential election gave us the resources to massively upgrade the app, site, and the digital piping behind it all. In short, we added data, made things easier to use, easier to share, easier to get brands’ attention, and better at giving you full access to the power of your dollars. Because so much has changed, we made a list of what you noticed, what you didn’t, what we’re nearly done with, and what we’re just beginning.
Now Showing
- UI Redesign – After years of our old look, we’ve upgraded to something befitting an app this widely used. It features a more modern design, easier to read layout, and simpler navigation
- Home page
- Trending Companies – the brand list now defaults to the companies the whole user base is most interested in
- Featured news stories
- Games – like LinkedIn & the NYT, we realized learning is easier when it comes in the form of a game. Redder or Bluer & Trump or Not are currently available to play
- Investments – the complement to consumer activism is investor activism, so we’ve compiled a variety of ways for investors to affect change too
- Filter – search results are now filterable by category, party, and for premium users, issue support/opposition
- Brand pages
- Buying Influence – this was the single most widely requested feature. Forms of pay to play outside of traditional campaign finance (like inaugural donations) are now shown in the Politicians tab of each brand
- Support/Boycott – pressing either now adds the brand to your profile for tracking
- Company logos – brand pages for public companies now look better and more clearly communicate which company you’re looking at
- Info buttons – question marks next to every data point that explain exactly what you’re seeing, how it’s measured, and a link for even more information
- Follow button – adds the brand to your profile
- Share button – at the top right, now even easier to see
- Other Brands – more accurate recommendations for substitutes
- More Info – shows parent company-subsidiary relationships to clarify what data you’re looking at
- Politician pages – The 8 political issues we show in Company of the Week and to premium users for every brand, are measured by determining how funded representatives vote on those issues. This underlying data is now directly accessible on each politician’s page
- News – Now opens natively, auto-scaled to your mobile device
- Profile
- Followed companies – a list of every brand you follow, support, or boycott
- Surveys – the Rate Yourself survey can now be retaken from your Profile
- Store – Massively revamped, in both look and available products
- Menu – Easier to find what you need, with a new tutorial explaining how and why to use Goods and a bug report feature
- Website – Also got a huge visual upgrade
- Performance – The app now runs on your phone using less energy, especially on older devices
- Server – Moved to a more modern, scalable backend design that not only allows for more users, but costs us a fraction of what it used to
- Outreach – Discussions and cross-promotion with a variety of other political & data-focused groups like us. You’ll see more about these partnerships soon
- Substack – Replaced our weekly email
- Android Parity – For years our android users were missing some key features. In the past year we’ve completely closed the gap with iOS, and continue to prioritize keeping them in sync with each other
Available Soon
- ICE support/opposition – The votes for this issue are recorded and in the process of being added to the app
- Trump badge– Since all of our users hold such strong opinions about the President, we’ve designed a Trump badge to display instead of the red, blue, grey, and green badges for those brands that fund him
- Give Feedback button – lets you share, speak, substitute, or shop, as well as automatically adding the brand to your profile
- Buying Influence – More data points like ballroom contributions
- Impact goal – The number of politically aware customers for each brand necessary to get management’s attention. Will be calculated as a percentage of quarterly or monthly customers, to better show you which brands can be most immediately impacted, and more clearly show the brands how much their customers care about money in politics
- Affiliate links – Discounts on what you love from brands that don’t hate your values. These are intended to make the shop part of consumer activism even more rewarding
- Update dates – The date for each brand when its data was last refreshed. The code for this feature is in place but requires fully retooling our data pipeline to implement
- Display options – More flexibility in how you see the data
- All brands that donate – A comprehensive list of companies in the FEC database. This is 60% done
- Data pipeline – We used to maintain most of this completely by hand and have gradually been speeding up the process. After these upgrades are done, our workflows will be exponentially faster and allow us to do more of, well, everything
- Personalized notifications – Updates about companies you follow, support, or boycott
- Politician metadata – Data like portraits, state, chamber, district, past campaigns, etc.
- Brand metadata – Data like HQ, size, business description, etc.
Coming Attractions
- A dynamic survey that includes any brand we have data for, so you get an exact impact score for your dollars
- Extremely precise recommendations for substitute brands
- A list of politicians that live in your profile, that links directly to your incumbents’ & challengers’ pages
- Leaderboard of the most supported/boycotted brands
- List of the top races in the country by fundraising
- An impact system to help identify exactly how your use of the app is creating change
- Barcode scanner
What would you like to see?
It’s easier to empower you as consumers & investors when you share what works & what you want to see. Most of this list is the product of other users doing just that. Drop us a line at contact@goodsuniteus.com