In 2022, Heather Nelson, a longtime professor of entrepreneurship and marketing, was teaching a class when she had a “eureka” moment. As she was writing on the whiteboard, she had a vision of “this platform on my phone so I can click yes or no … and somehow, on the other end, my elected official knows what the Nelson household (thinks about their policy).”

But a critical internal voice also asked, “Is it a business or is it an idea?”

Years later, Nelson has succeeded in making it a real business. She is now the founder and CEO of Ideologix Insights, the data company behind Poll The Vote, a nonpartisan survey platform that aims to connect constituents with their elected leaders.

Since its public launch in early 2025, Poll The Vote has surveyed Nebraskans about passenger rail with State Sen. Margo Juarez, polled Omaha residents about Blackstone development and worked with the Kearney County assessor to get data about building preservation.

There are about 3,000 Nebraskans on the platform, with a 30/70 split in favor of rural areas, and about 500 participants across roughly 29 other states. Those successes bring Nelson one step closer to her goal with Poll The Vote: To make civic engagement easy and accessible. 

Right now, Nebraskans “have to take off a day of work, we have to haul down to Lincoln, and we have to testify,” she said. “I don’t have time for that. Most people don’t have time for that. And that’s why we have little actual engagement.”

As Nelson builds up Ideologix and Poll The Vote, she has a partner in Scott Data, the nonprofit data center in Omaha. Nelson is part of Scott Data’s incubator, where startups that align with the nonprofit’s vision can find a quiet place to grow on its Aksarben campus.

“There’s a lot of shared conference room space in our office (and) it’s highly secure,” said Rob Wiebusch, head of sales at Scott Data, about the appeal of the incubator space.

“It’s not necessarily like we’re actively working with those startups to incubate their ideas,” he said. “We’re giving them more of a framework of like, ‘Here’s the infrastructure. Let us know what you need.’”

Inspiration and action

Nelson decided to create Poll The Vote after the chaotic 2023 state legislative session. Nebraska received national attention when some lawmakers filibustered practically every bill to protest legislation targeting transgender children.

At another time, Nelson was watching the news, and she saw a mother testifying at the Legislature. “I didn’t know who she was … I didn’t even know the topic,” she said. “This is how naive I was: I said to myself, ‘Get a sub tomorrow. Cancel class. Whatever you’re going to do, you need to go down to Lincoln and help this mom.’”

But Nelson realized she was too late for the hearing. About a week later, she woke up in the middle of the night and registered the domain pollthevote.com.

She took early retirement from Metro Community College in mid-2023 and took time off from teaching at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Having saved up money, Nelson had another crucial safety net to aid the startup journey.

“The big thing that I do have from teaching that long … is I have health insurance,” Nelson said. “That actually stalls a lot of small businesses because they’re so reliant upon needing to work their full-time job to have benefits that they can’t do their startup.”

In 2023, Nelson received a prototype grant from the Nebraska Department of Economic Development, hired local software firm Appsky and got to work. 

Nebraskan govtech 

Poll The Vote is a self-contained platform where residents can, for free, make an account and enter in their demographic and personal information. That data is then anonymized and split up for storage to make it secure. 

That way, survey data can filter by resident information — say, age or political affiliation — but not expose individuals and their names. The heavy data focus made Nelson separate the platform from the startup. “That was when I knew, really, at the end of the day, we’re a data analytics company,” she said.

That’s also why being part of the Scott Data incubator program is helpful. Not only does that give Nelson an office space, it is also an opportunity to use Scott Data’s expertise to safely use artificial intelligence tools for data analysis.

But Poll The Vote is also evolving into a kind of social media where elected officials, candidates for political office and civic organizations can engage constituents with less vitriol. 

Once signed up, residents get a chronological feed from the politicians who represent them and can decide who to follow or mute. Accounts — including candidates and churches, for example — can post updates and surveys, getting quick feedback on their policies, but residents can’t comment on the posts.

“I’ve talked with many elected officials about it, and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, thank you,’” Nelson said. “They don’t want to have negativity on their platform. They’re just looking for a one-way positive (communication channel).”

Poll The Vote is also working on a private messaging feature so residents can communicate with their representatives. 

When it comes to larger-scale surveys, Nelson writes up background information for respondents. She also designs the questions with the help of a survey contractor rather than letting politicians decide wording. Nelson said she does not work with outside polling organizations to vet questions for bias and quality.

“I teach survey analysis, I teach feasibility study assessment,” Nelson said. “When I was a teen, most of us in my small town, we all went and worked for the survey company … So I’ve been around surveys all my life. Am I the expert at it? No, but I do do quite a bit of it.”

Nelson emphasizes that Poll The Vote is a populist survey platform. That means it doesn’t take a representative sample, like many polls do, to try to accurately describe trends in sentiment or voting patterns. Instead, all data comes from whoever is on the platform.

“Even though it might not be statistically representative of the people in your constituency, you can see who they are and make your own deductions,” Nelson said. “The more users we have on the platform, the more (results are) going to get more solid … It’s a numbers game at this particular point in time.”

So far, the reception has been positive from Nebraska elected leaders, Nelson said. Poll The Vote also received a glowing feature by PopVox, a national nonprofit supporting government technology and innovation.

Alongside other local startups, Nelson hopes she is making Nebraska a known place for government-focused tech companies. “Here we have insurance and (medicine) and finance … but we really haven’t necessarily seen civic, govtech come out” in the startup ecosystem, she said. 

Lev Gringauz is a Report for America corps member who writes about corporate innovation and workforce development for Silicon Prairie News.