Phone polling has collapsed. Online panels are polluted. The Accelerated Research Platform collects guided cell-phone video interviews — natural language, at scale — verified by AI and human reviewers, and turned into research and media your organization can actually use.
Our current featured project: The Black Women's Labor Project
Currently in active use with select partners. Built by Farai Chideya / Living Politics.
Why now
Campaigns and organizing groups are flying blind. Phone response rates have collapsed. Online panels are polluted with bots and professional survey-takers. And even well-designed surveys produce sanitized answers to pre-scripted questions — they miss the anger, the hope, the nuance that actually drives behavior.
The deeper problem isn't the medium. It's that people hate answering boring questions. The real signal is in how people talk, not which box they check.
The platform
Participants discover the platform through partner invite links and referral codes, or open panel recruitment. Mobile-first, no app needed.
A guided phone-video interview. Five prompts, one at a time, about three minutes each.
AI transcribes, diarizes, and extracts themes, timelines, and claims. Sensitive content is flagged for human review.
A human reviewer checks the transcript against the video, cross-references public details, and approves, flags, or requests follow-up. Every decision is logged.
Verified, consent-scoped stories reach partners through filtered lookbooks — searchable by industry, theme, geography, and date.
Every stage is auditable. Every release is consent-scoped.
What you can build
Build a verified record of lived experience — layoffs, housing, healthcare, civic failures and successes. Stories are preserved with consent, fact-checked, and routed to journalists, attorneys, researchers, and advocates. With participant permission, the same footage becomes media: social content, testimonial packages, earned-media assets.
Run continuous, natural-language opinion research at scale. Participants are recruited through referral codes from trusted organizations — parties, unions, civil rights groups, community orgs — or through a broader open panel. AI parses themes and issues across thousands of responses; longitudinal tracking shows how narratives shift over time. Qualitative depth, at quantitative scale.
Track record
In 2016, reporting for FiveThirtyEight's The Voters series, Farai Chideya found that qualitative field reporting predicted the outcome of that year's presidential election before the quantitative data did. The signal was in the texture of what people said — not the horse-race numbers.
ARP is built to capture that texture systematically, at scale, using natural-language AI tuned by people with years of experience across politics, journalism, and sociology.
Non-negotiable
Who it's for
Verified stories reach investigative journalists, civil rights attorneys, academic researchers, and policy advocates — with participants' consent controlling exactly who sees what.
ARP is fully built and connected to a live database. Partners can add new issue domains and research modules through configuration — not new code. Current development is building toward a full election-cycle deployment of monthly survey waves, at a per-response cost competitive with traditional polling.
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