As innovative political tactics go, “Tell your friends” does not sound quite cutting edge. And yet, as the 2020 election lurches into gear, there may be no hotter trend in the campaign tech world than “relational organizing”: apps that help leverage good old-fashioned word of mouth—and the contact list on your smartphone—to drive turnout.

These platforms, with names like Team and Outvote, first sprung up from the wreckage of the Democrats’ loss in 2016, as tech-minded liberals, horrified by Donald Trump’s win, sought ways to turn his massive unpopularity into votes for Democratic candidates. The approach gained wider attention during the 2018 midterms, when Democrats, many wielding the new technology, managed to flip the House of Representatives. Now, as we approach the first presidential campaign in these startups’ brief histories, along with hundreds of down-ballot races that together will determine which party shapes the next decade of American politics, the question is: Can relational organizing give Democrats the edge they need?

Michael Luciani holds the dubious distinction of having worked as an organizer for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in Michigan. In 2016, unsure of exactly what his supervisors expected him to be doing, he experimented with his own approaches. He asked his volunteers to post pro-Hillary messages to Facebook. He also asked them to take the list of voters they were supposed to call and, instead of just starting at the top, look through their phone contacts and start by calling the people they actually knew. The results were intriguing, if intuitive: Voters were much more receptive to campaign calls when they came from someone familiar.

But when Luciani approached higher-ups about implementing his methods more widely, he was shut down. His supervisor was being judged by things the campaign could measure, like total phone calls made and doors knocked on. There was no way to get credit for having volunteers reach out to their personal networks. The existing campaign technology wasn’t designed to take advantage of relationships.

That, at any rate, is the origin story Luciani tells about the Tuesday Company, the project he and two friends developed in the rubble of the 2016 election. Their Team app, Luciani explained to me recently, fixes the problems he encountered in Michigan by allowing campaigns to “organize, coordinate, and measure volunteers’ relational communication and social media activity.” In other words, it turns the kind of informal conversations people are already having about politics into the medium of organized persuasion and turnout efforts. Volunteers upload their contacts—friends, family, coworkers, whomever—to the app. The campaign matches those contacts against their voter lists and tells the volunteers which ones to reach out to, when, and on what subject. Organizers can suggest scripted messaging, but the volunteers are ultimately in control of what they write, as well as what medium they use—texting, Facebook, Twitter DM, and so on. They can also use the app to post to social media in a way that allows the campaign to track engagement.

The basic idea is that a message will be more effective at getting you to vote if it comes from someone you know and trust than if it comes through a cold call or campaign advertisement. (In theory, the apps can be used to try to get people to back a particular candidate over another—but one of the firmest findings in political science is that turnout, while difficult, is much easier than persuasion, which is nearly impossible.) Along with the Tuesday Company, other key startups based on this premise include OutreachCircle (formerly called VoterCircle) and Outvote. All three have gotten funding from Higher Ground Labs, a progressive tech accelerator created by former Obama staffers in 2017.