Slack, the workplace messaging tool originally designed for media and tech industry offices, has become so ubiquitous in the US that it’s being adopted by dairy farms and luxury restaurants.
Add Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign team to that list. Its latest Federal Election Commission filing includes about $160 in charges paid to the San Francisco company during the first three months of this year:
The Trump campaign appears to have just switched to the banter-friendly app. A review of the campaign’s previous FEC filings, for the last quarter of 2018, show no payments to Slack, whose standard plan costs $8 per user per month.
The Trump campaign’s payment to Slack is just a tiny drop in the overall $8.8 million that it paid out over the first three months of 2019 to companies from law firm Jones Day to Amazon. The campaign, fueled by $80 million in donations so far, has divided the country into nine regions, the WSJ reports, and plans to add 50 communications staff—about double the number it had in 2016.
Slack is such an effortless way to keep in touch with remote offices that it can be a distraction. At Slack’s own headquarters, executives designed a special emoji, the “polite raccoon,” which “signals a desire to discontinue conversations that are off-topic, irrelevant, or straight-up annoying,” co-founder Cal Henderson told Quartz at Work last year.
No word yet on how the campaign teams of Trump’s 20-plus Democratic challengers are communicating. It is pretty clear that they do, however, have a lot more dogs.