Congress In Your Pocket doubles down on subscription model

When a reporter in Nebraska needs to find a source for pending legislation in D.C., or a lobbyist wants to check the background of a congressman before a meeting, they use Congress in Your Pocket, an app that provides contact information on congressmen and their staff, and much more. 

They can also click to see committees and subcommittees the congressman sits on, bills sponsored or co-sponsored,  a short bio,  a rating on the odds of the politician being re-elected from Saboto’s Crystal Ball,  their recent Tweets,  a map to their office, and – as of last year – their  Linkedin profile.

The app is updated daily.

The founder,  Michael Cohen, who has a Ph.D. in political science and calls himself the publisher of  Congress in Your Pocket, still says it is not a media company but an information company.

He created the app in 2004 on the first iPhone while working for Gallup as a political researcher.

The idea was to compete with the old-school Leadership Directory, which was high-priced, hard to carry around, and updated quarterly.

Cohen saw the opportunity to create an app to solve these issues by putting a directory on the new iPhone. He  jumped onto rentacoder.com and hired “someone from France.” They worked to build the app before anyone else got the same idea. It started off, he says, “as a hobby of mine.” 

The name was a riff on Steve Jobs’s explanation of the then-new iPhone as a thousand songs in your pocket.

“It is a cheekier version,” Cohen said, about the play on words. 

Then things took off.

Apple has featured it in the app store more than ten times. MacWorld and The Washingtonian wrote about it. CNN has identified it as the Official App of Congress, although it is actually a private company with no official relationship.

When Congressman Henry Cuellar from Texas literally brought the first iPad onto the floor of the house, he told a reporter who questioned its necessity, “It’s not like I’m playing games on here. I’m using Congress In Your Pocket. “ 

The launch was not without issues. The first challenge to keep the information up-to-date and as close to real-time as possible.

“What I learned very quickly is that if the information was wrong. subscribers got really angry,” Cohen said. 

The solution was a button on the information page so members could update profiles if they switched jobs, or got on a new committee. The app updates from the cloud every time a user opens it – so it is still useable in the Dirksen Senate dining room and other basement rooms where there is no internet. 

Cohen still gets calls from U.S. Senators, members of the House, and their staff about the updates.  “It has led to come interesting conversations.”

Another challenge was an onslaught of competitors early on. One app gave a bobblehead to each congressman, which wobbled when viewer shook their phone.

”I was really worried,” Cohen said.  But after the first few years,  “The gold rush was basically over, and you were left with organizations that were really committed.” 

One is still the Leadership Directory, which floated the possibility of a buyout, asked a lot of questions, and then also built an app, Cohen said.

“Their database is deeper than ours, but they still only update once a quarter, so it’s out of date. Our tech is much better than anyone in the industry.”

Congress In Your Pocket works on all devices, from the Apple Watch to a Dell computer, and hosts a variety of in-app communications between members of the enterprise version.

“There is not anyone who offers anything close to what we do.“

Cohen said he ballparks his individual members at more than 100,000, who pay from $1.99  a month, through the Apple store, which takes 15%

The majority of the revenue comes from 50 or so Enterprise members, such as Habitat for Humanity, who pay a standard fee based on the number of members with access.

The enterprise members have other communication tools in the app. When Habitat brings its team to Washington for a week of lobbying, it can input notes on talking points and “things you might want to look out for” in advance and share them with team members, who can also then share notes on what happened in a meeting on the app.

Cohen now has a partner who is in charge of the technology and runs a lean company with no employees,  just contractors who take phone calls and update the database every day, he said.

When asked about other applications or the software, Cohen says, they had apps for 30 state governments, but the math on revenues did not work, so they still offer it to others on a licensing basis. Delaware and the UK Parliament both run apps of their own on the platform. 

He has also been approached about selling the company a number of times, including by Politico and  Leadership Directory, Cohen said. However, he worried that they were going to “turn it into something else,” and fill it with ads.  

“It was a good call, “ he said. “You should do things that you feel very passionate about and stay with it.” 

Cohen, himself, still works in political research as CEO of Cohen Research Group, Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Modern Political Campaigns.