Murmuration: What were you doing before working at Murmuration?

Marygrace Galston: Before Murmuration, I spent my entire career in politics and government. For Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, I was the Deputy Director for Iowa, helping run his 2007 announcement tour and build out the campaign’s operation across the state. We hired staff, opened around 50 offices, and organized for the Iowa caucuses, where he ultimately won. After that, I moved to campaign headquarters in Chicago and served as Director of the National Campaign for Change, helping coordinate field operations through state Democratic parties across the country.

After the election, I worked on the presidential transition team and then served as the White House liaison to the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration. Later, I joined a consulting firm made up largely of former Obama staffers, where I stayed until the opportunity to bring that experience to Murmuration came along.

Murmuration: Was there a formative experience that brought you to this role or working at Murmuration?

MG: After the 2016 election and after having my daughter, I realized I wanted to feel more connected to the impact of the work I was doing. I wanted to use the skill set I’d built over years in electoral politics in a way that could directly help communities.

What drew me to Murmuration was the mission. We were providing high-quality analytics, voter modeling, and data tools to organizations that otherwise could never afford them. I had spent years working on campaigns where millions of dollars went into building these kinds of models, so the idea that we could make that science accessible—and in many cases free—to grassroots organizations felt incredibly powerful. I thought, “This is amazing, and this is exactly what should be happening,” and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.

Murmuration: You’ve built a career at the intersection of public service, campaigns, and partnerships, including work on the Obama campaign and at the Environmental Protection Agency. How did those experiences shape the path that brought you to Murmuration?

MG: My first experience with campaigns was actually as a volunteer in college. I was the president of the Colorado State University Young Democrats–which would probably surprise nobody–where I helped recruit volunteers to work on local races in Fort Collins. After graduating, I joined Colorado’s coordinated campaign during a U.S. Senate race, and I just never stopped. From there, it was one campaign after another, including John Kerry’s presidential campaign and, later, the Obama campaign and administration.

My entire career has been about organizing—working with people in communities and helping build the infrastructure that allows them to create change. Murmuration felt like a natural extension of that work. We’re operating at a national scale, but the impact is deeply local, supporting organizations that know their communities best. Having spent years on campaigns, I understand how partners use data, tools, and organizing to move the needle, and I’m able to bring that perspective into the work we do every day.

Murmuration: Walk me through a day in the life of your role at Murmuration.

MG: I live in Denver, but I work East Coast hours, so my days start early—especially in the summer when my daughter is on two swim teams and I’m sometimes at the pool by 5:30 a.m. Like a lot of people who’ve spent decades in politics, the first thing I do when I wake up is check my phone. I check Slack, my email, and my messages to make sure nothing urgent has happened overnight. In almost five years at Murmuration, there’s never really been an emergency, but old habits die hard.

As Senior Director of Partnerships, I lead our Partner Success team, which currently includes 10 people, with another new hire on the way. Most of the team manages portfolios of partners, helping onboard and train them, troubleshoot issues, provide data and reporting support, and make sure they’re getting the most out of our tools. A big part of my role is making sure my team has what they need to support those partners, while also serving as a bridge between the field and our internal teams. I spend a lot of time in meetings with Product, Data, Engineering, and Research, sharing what we’re hearing from partners and helping solve problems together. Our team is often the first to understand what organizations need—whether that’s early vote data during a busy election season or improvements to a product feature—and we help turn that feedback into action across the organization.

My calendar is usually packed with Zoom meetings, presentations, and check-ins, but I’m still pretty old school. I keep a notebook on my desk and rewrite my to-do list every morning. By the time I wrap up around 3:30 local time, I’m usually switching gears pretty quickly—grabbing whatever I forgot to meal prep and heading into mom mode, driving my daughter to her many activities before ending the day with a little terrible Bravo television.

Murmuration: Partnerships are central to Murmuration’s model. How do the needs and feedback of our partners help shape the tools, services, and support we provide?

MG: Because we're the team working directly with partners every day, the feedback our Partner Success Managers receive is some of the most valuable information in the organization. They're constantly sharing what partners need, what challenges they're facing, and what they're hoping to accomplish with our Product, Data, Engineering, and Research teams.

At the same time, our PSMs are some of the biggest power users of the platform themselves. They're onboarding, training, and troubleshooting alongside partners every day, so they have a deep understanding of how the tools are actually being used. They're able to translate partner needs into actionable feedback while also bringing their own expertise as hands-on users of the platform.

Murmuration: Can you share an example of how collaboration with a partner has led to meaningful impact in communities?

MG: A great example is our partnership with LEE. Their Partner Success Manager and Data Success Manager have really embedded themselves in the organization's work and built a strong collaborative relationship. In the last election cycle, candidates using Organizer and Atlas through LEE had a 77% win rate, and many of those were challenging races for local offices like school boards, often with campaign budgets of only a few thousand dollars.

What makes the partnership especially exciting is that it's constantly evolving. We're not just providing data and tools—we're working together to improve them. Whether it's refining a custom score, enhancing their data, or helping future candidates better understand their communities before they even launch a campaign, we're collaborating to build long-term capacity. It's been a real game-changer.

The principles we talked about then—respect, empower, and include—are the same ones I try to bring to my work at Murmuration. If you invest in communities and give people the tools and support they need, they can create meaningful change.

Murmuration: What is your advice to others who want to work in a similar field or industry?

MG: I always come back to the Tip O'Neill quote: "All politics is local." I've worked on a lot of national campaigns, including presidential races, but at the end of the day, campaigns are won community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood.

I saw that firsthand in Iowa during the Obama campaign. We built offices across the state because we believed that if you give people a place to gather, organize, and contribute, they'll build something bigger than a campaign—they'll build a movement. The principles we talked about then—respect, empower, and include—are the same ones I try to bring to my work at Murmuration. If you invest in communities and give people the tools and support they need, they can create meaningful change.