WHO'S BEHIND THIS
Meet the Founders
Amy Pritchard and Will Robinson built Democracy University to make four decades of campaign, organizing, and communications craft accessible to the people coming up next.
HOW IT STARTED
Nearly four decades in the fight
Amy & Will · Red Sox game at Fenway Park
Amy and Will first met as young political professionals working on Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential campaign. Their friendship and collaboration now span nearly four decades of elections, advocacy, consulting, training, organizational building, career development, and a great deal of learning from other people.
They have helped one another think, build, teach, hire, mentor, launch projects, and support the careers of people entering and growing in this work. Democracy University is, in part, their decision to make that accumulated learning more accessible.
Neither believes the lessons in these manuals belong to them alone. Political craft is cumulative. Good practitioners borrow, test, improve, argue with, and pass on what they learned from someone else. The purpose of this series is to make that chain of learning visible and to invite the next generation to add to it.
Amy Pritchard
FOUNDER · GAIN POWER & DEMOCRACY UNIVERSITY
Amy Pritchard is a campaign strategist, trainer, democracy entrepreneur, and founder of GAIN Power and Democracy University. Across a career spanning Democratic politics, advocacy, political workforce development, voter contact, communications, organizing, international democracy work, and leadership development, she has focused on a consistent question: how do we help more people gain the skills, relationships, confidence, opportunity, and power to do meaningful democracy work?
Amy has trained, worked with, and learned alongside democracy leaders across the United States and in more than 25 countries. Her training work has included campaign planning, targeting, public speaking, organizing, communications, voter contact, mobilization, research, leadership, advertising, events, scheduling, advance, power building, and professional development.
She has worked with emerging leaders and practitioners in countries including Rwanda, South Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, Myanmar, Indonesia, Venezuela, Kosovo, Kenya, Thailand, Belgium, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as with political professionals across the United States.
For Amy, training is as much about being a learner as being a trainer. Some of her closest friendships, best professional relationships, and most important lessons came from being in training rooms herself. She believes people do not know what they do not know — and that a good trainer can help someone see a possibility, a career, a tactic, a form of power, or a way of leading that they had not known was available to them.
That is why Democracy University is designed not simply to transfer information, but to create community, mentorship, career pathways, and a culture of people teaching one another.
Will Robinson
FOUNDING PARTNER · THE NEW MEDIA FIRM
Will Robinson is a founding partner of The New Media Firm and has spent more than four decades helping shape the evolution of Democratic campaigns. His career stretches from helping pioneer the coordinated-campaign model to helping campaigns, labor unions, advocacy organizations, and ballot-measure efforts navigate artificial intelligence, fragmented media, changing voter behavior, and the attention economy.
Will helped develop coordinated-campaign strategy that became a foundation of modern Democratic field operations and contributed to Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential victory. He later founded the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center and, in 2007, co-founded The New Media Firm, an early pioneer in integrating television, digital media, online organizing, and emerging technologies into a unified communications strategy.
His work has spanned presidential, Senate, congressional, gubernatorial, legislative, labor, advocacy, and ballot-measure campaigns, with more than forty national and statewide victories and an 87–7 ballot-initiative record. Will was named the American Association of Political Consultants Democratic Campaign Strategist of the Year, has received more than sixty national campaign and creative awards, and received GAIN Power's 2025 Living Legend Award.
Today his work combines strategy, technology, behavioral science, AI, values-based persuasion, rapid message testing, creator networks, vote-by-mail and early-vote strategy, and integrated paid, earned, owned, and organic media. One of the principles he brings to Democracy University is simple and important: technology is infrastructure, not strategy. The tools keep changing; human behavior, relationships, trust, motivation, and the discipline of making choices remain central.
Training, to us, has never been only about learning a new skill. Skills matter enormously, but the best training rooms do something larger: they build community, make hidden knowledge visible, connect people across generations of work, and create opportunities for people who might not otherwise have had access to them.
Democracy University is built around that idea — to make the chain of learning visible and invite the next generation to add to it.
Read the manuals they built
Twelve living manuals capturing the craft of running campaigns, organizing communities, and defending democracy.