What I do now
At The Adriel Hampton Group (founded 2015), Adriel leads creative and strategy for organizations whose campaigns have collectively reached and persuaded hundreds of millions of people online. AHG specializes in online-to-offline (O2O) Meta lead-acquisition for nonprofits with real supporter-growth goals — capturing email and phone in a single campaign and building the automation that turns a contact into a same-day conversation. The firm is built for the organizations where most progressive organizing actually happens: c4 advocacy groups, community-organizing networks, tenant and housing-justice campaigns, worker organizing, and immigrant rights.
In March 2025, AHG won a Reed Award for Best Use of AI Technology by a Creative Agency — the political and advocacy industry's highest honor, from Campaigns & Elections — as a co-recipient with Tavern Research and Basis Technologies, for work supporting Dan Osborn for U.S. Senate in Nebraska.
Adriel also leads Conscious Fathers, a podcast and media project on conscious parenting and men's work, co-hosted with Jeff Swift.
The throughline: a man who works the system, not a side of it
Find the leverage point in a system before anyone else notices it's there, and pull.
That instinct earned him a Rising Star designation from Campaigns & Elections in 2013 — the franchise whose inaugural 1988 class included David Axelrod and James Carville. He earned it from a nonpartisan seat, named to a class drawn from both parties and neither. He is a man of the left, but he has never been anyone's reliable foot soldier.
You can trace the instinct backward through every chapter.
Taking on Facebook — and winning the argument (2019)
After Facebook told Congress it would allow politicians to run demonstrably false ads, Adriel registered as a candidate for Governor of California for one reason: to run the false ads back at the platform and force it to confront its own policy. The campaign — built around his PAC, The Really Online Lefty League (TROLL) — became global news, covered by the New York Times, CNN, The Guardian, Newsweek, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, Axios, Mashable, PBS, and The Hill. The LA Times called him "the most interesting gubernatorial candidate in the country." The ad spend that started it was about two dollars. He also co-founded Really American, one of the largest progressive communities on Facebook.
Building the organizing internet (2011–2015)
Adriel was a founding team member at NationBuilder, the Los Angeles political-technology company backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Sean Parker, where he served as Chief Organizer and Vice President of Business Development. He took the customer base from 30 to 400 organizational users in nine months, launched the Architects and Experts certification programs, and built the Apps ecosystem to more than 1,000 developer API keys and 25+ integrated apps. He worked directly with clients including the British Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, Media Matters for America, and California Governor Jerry Brown. He went on to co-found and serve as president of Pinpoint Predictive, a San Francisco startup pioneering predictive-personality advertising.
Tweeting his way into Congress before that was a thing (2009)
When a Bay Area House seat opened up, Adriel became the first congressional candidate in history to launch a campaign on Twitter — covered by Politico, the National Journal, and the Chickasaw Times. Matt Gonzalez, former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, hosted his endorsement party. He lost to a former Lieutenant Governor and walked away with a national profile and a thesis about how attention works.
Documenting open government before it had a name (2009–2011)
Adriel launched Gov 2.0 Radio, opening with an interview with Web 2.0 pioneer Tim O'Reilly and producing over 100 episodes by 2010, with guests including Craig Newmark and others. He organized CityCamp San Francisco and was named GovFresh's Citizen of the Year in 2011. He has carried the work abroad, coaching government professionals on social media in Kuala Lumpur and speaking in Edmonton and Ottawa.
Before all of it: the newsroom and the badge
Adriel started by finding things out and writing them down.
He was a journalist — editor-in-chief of The Impact at San Joaquin Delta College, then a news editor and copy editor at ANG Newspapers (Bay Area News Group) and the Lodi News-Sentinel, and finally Political Editor at the San Francisco Examiner, where over five years he also worked as front-page editor, City Hall reporter, City Editor, and editorial writer. He designed more than a thousand front pages and wrote the Examiner's first blog — "The Body Politic" — read daily by a few hundred of the insiders and officials who run San Francisco, often breaking news there before it reached print.
Then he spent six years as a civil investigator for the San Francisco City Attorney's Office, where he still holds a private investigator's license. He led a whistleblower investigation that uncovered a long-running fraud ring on Treasure Island that ended in resignations and criminal charges for several City high-voltage electricians, and was part of the response to the 2007 Christmas Day tiger mauling at the San Francisco Zoo. He knows how a story gets found, not just how it gets told — which is, in the end, the same skill that makes a campaign land.
Roots: Chickasaw, Californian, first in the family
Adriel was born in Modesto, California, and spent his early years in Manteca, Escalon, and Valley Springs. He was the first in his immediate family to earn a Bachelor's degree, graduating from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Rhetoric — after stints delivering pizzas and laying roofs, and a first job in the public interest as a clerk in the Calaveras County District Attorney's office at seventeen.
He is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, and his heritage is a living family story he has worked to document. He carries the name and grassroots instinct of his grandfather, Bo Hampton, a veteran and cowboy in San Joaquin County. His family's record of Indigenous leadership is remarkable: his uncle, Dr. Eber Hampton, served as president of the First Nations University of Canada; his cousin, John G. Hampton, is CEO of the MacKenzie Art Gallery and the first Indigenous person to lead a major public art gallery in Canada; and his sister, Dr. Sierra Hampton, completed a PhD at UC Berkeley in 2026 with research on Chickasaw food sovereignty. As Adriel puts it, his belief in grassroots power — that communities have the right and capacity to govern themselves, house and feed themselves, and tell their own stories — comes from his Chickasaw heritage as much as from his years in organizing.
More on his heritage: adrielhampton.com/chickasaw
California Naturalist
In 2026, Adriel became a Certified California Naturalist through the University of California's Environmental Stewards program. An avid trail walker and iNaturalist contributor, he built two public field resources for his corner of the coast: CarlsbadTours.com, a nature guide to Carlsbad's lagoons and trails ("City of Lagoons"), and LakeCalavera.com, a field guide to the native plants and wildlife of the Lake Calavera Preserve powered by the iNaturalist API. The same find-it-and-write-it-down instinct that produced The Body Politic and Gov 2.0 Radio, pointed now at lagoons and trails.
The human section
He's been a pizza deliveryman and a roofer. He won the Tough Mudder global costume contest as a bald man dressed as Rapunzel, hauling himself through the mud beside a crew of Disney princesses. His two oldest sons spent half their childhoods in Tokyo and came home; his youngest is growing up in Carlsbad. He got the white-picket-fence second life that's supposed to be impossible after a first one breaks.
Tough, crazy, and tender — usually in the same afternoon.