This week the Loop has visited Madrid to talk to Civio co-directors David Cabo and Eva Belmonte. Civio is a non-profit Spanish public service outlet, based on data journalism. They use technology as a tool to scrutinize public entities, contracts, and funds. But they also use technology to minimize the time they need to spend on administration.

Civio was founded on 2011 to make open data accessible and quickly realized that this ambition needed more than the data itself. It needed journalism to find the story and make it relatable to citizens.

Today, Civio employs 10 persons, and its economy is based on membership from almost 2000 persons and grants from different donors. Since they want to focus as much attention as possible on the content, they test out automation in many possible aspects, one of them being Customer Relation Management (CRM).

“At some point, we had one person overloaded with just handling questions from members. So we have tried to automate all that back office work. That makes us more efficient, and we invest less time, but we also make fewer mistakes. And we know that it is very, very difficult to get a new member, but very easy to lose one.”

Listen to the episode to hear how Civio tries to work with its audience, be constructive and be more sustainable.