SUCCESS STORY
Boosting Hilltop’s Civic Engagement Platforms With Actionable AI
Hilltop is an AI-powered civic engagement platform designed to amplify the impact of advocacy organizations. By connecting advocacy groups with lawmakers, Hilltop streamlines communication, boosts legislative influence, and drives policy change at scale.
Client Challenges
Hilltop needed a trusted technology partner to scale its platforms for high-volume civic use, secure message delivery to lawmakers, and real-time analytics across its two flagship platforms: Hilltop Connect (citizen engagement) and CivIQ (advocacy analytics).
Our Approach
AscentCore became Hilltop’s principal technology and AI development partner in April 2025, responsible for scaling the platform’s core architecture and performance. To bring Hilltop’s vision to life, our team did an incredible job covering the full stack of engineering, AI, analytics, and security:
- Platform Engineering: We scaled Hilltop’s React–Firebase–AWS platform with optimized data pipelines, integrations, and secure authentication to support real-time user interactions.
- Dashboard & Analytics Development: We developed CivIQ, a real-time analytics dashboard with campaign tracking, demographic insights, exportable reports, and advanced data segmentation for advocacy and policymaking.
- AI Development: Built GPT-based AI systems for personalized messaging, automated bill classification, and real-time sentiment analysis, powering CivIQ’s insight dashboards.
- Integrations & Security: Implemented secure CRM integrations and SOC-2–ready frameworks, enhancing reliability, compliance, and real-time system monitoring through Datadog.
Results & Impact
AscentCore demonstrated exceptional responsiveness to Hilltop’s evolving needs. Our team adopted an ownership mindset, anticipating challenges and proposing improvements before they were requested. For example, introducing data caching to reduce AI message generation time and suggesting Firebase optimizations that reduced load times by more than half.
Our technical leadership and approach have been central to Hilltop’s successful launch and early traction, helping them achieve meaningful results:
100K+
messages delivered securely to lawmakers
40K+
across web and mobile
>99.9%
and 60% faster AI message generation
AI-driven dashboards launched
powering real-time sentiment analytics.
SOC-2 readiness achieved
with incident response time reduced by 70%
5/5 Clutch Review
Our client rated AscentCore a perfect 5 out of 5 on Clutch, recognizing our blend of AI expertise, engineering efficiency, and a partnership approach that supported their goals.
"AscentCore brought advanced AI expertise and practical engineering execution under one roof."
Aubrey Ottenstein
Founder, Hilltop
Quality
5/5
Schedule
5/5
Cost
5/5
Willing to refer
5/5
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- 1 (703) 867-5055
- contact@ascentcore.com