CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

The ability to use CiviCRM to run advocacy campaigns and funnel constituents into a tool to contact their Congressional and State officials via a pre-written letter has been a goal for many. Especially as the commercial solutions on the market now, such as actionkit.com, theproponent.com, capwiz.com all cost many thousands of dollars to implement and maintain. Two interesting developments have happened recently that may mean there is a kind of solution.

First, WeGov.com announced a hosted version of CiviCRM+Drupal integrated with a state and congressional "contact congress" tool. Pricing seems to be far more reasonable than the previous proprietary solutions. However even this lower cost may not be feasible for non-profits just getting off the ground (and we are one of those). Additionally, while hosted versions can be a benefit to some organizations who do not want to mess with the details of hosting, it can put a cramp in the desire to customize or have full control over CiviCRM installations and operations.

The second development is the beta release of grasshopr.com. They are a SAAS freemium model that offers the key "action" tool to create a pre-written letter to have constituents contact their Congressional and State officials. Since an "action" can be created with a public URL as part of the free version, this URL can easily be worked into a CiviMail campaign. Drawback is members would need to create a (free) account on the grasshopr.com website in order to take that action. As part of their paid model, grasshopr.com offers an API that can sync membership lists as well as launch a campaign from another site (such as CiviCRM). This API maybe the key to smooth and cost effective integration for CiviAction type functionality with the bonus of being able to have full control of your own CiviCRM installation.

PS. I am not a part of either WeGov nor Grasshopr.

Another new service to potentially integrate with is PopVox: http://www.popvox.com/

seems like a lot of stuff in the advocacy arena is happening which is great for everyone involved

lobo

I know this is an old post, but I wanted to correct some misconceptions.

First some background about me. My company votervoice.net has provided a turnkey grassroots advocacy solution since 2000. Our clients include hundreds of small associations at the federal, state and local levels. We have also provided the advocacy components for the US Chamber websites since 2008. Most recently (Mar 2010-Nov 2010), I served on the technical working group of the Communicating With Congress effort, sponsored by the Congressional Management Foundation. Our mission is to simplify message delivery to Congress by proposing an open alternative to Congressional webforms.

Currently, almost all Congressional offices and some state offices employ webforms to filter and block unwanted messages. Any grassroots advocacy software worthy of the name must be able to reliably deliver messages to these webforms. If your solution cannot do this, you are throwing your money away. Only a handful of companies and organizations can deliver to Congressional webforms. Specifically, and the reason for my post, a number of the companies mentioned in this thread cannot currently deliver messages to Congressional webforms.

Until Congress changes its current system (and this will likely take a few years), CiviCRM by itself, will not be able to overcome the obstacle of webform delivery. Parsing, monitoring, and updating webforms takes a lot of time and skill. It is a daily task. CiviCRM integrated with webform updates from Sunlight or something like that possibly could solve this problem down the road. But this is not on Sunlight's roadmap, as far as I know. Even if you could get those webform updates from Sunlight, your organization would still need a system to store any failed messages and resend those messages after your system was updated. Building such a system would take a good bit of time.

In the meantime, if you would like to demo an affordable solution to this problem that is available right now, please feel free to contact us at votervoice.net. We have a mature API, which should allow integration with CiviCRM. Capwiz is also a solid service. They cost a little more than we do, but they have a few features we don't have. They are reliable and worth a look. There are also a few other companies that can deliver to webforms (Convio, DDC, Vocus, ActionKit and maybe others), but they tend to be much more expensive.

Remember to ask hard questions of any vendor or open source project. Look beyond the marketing hype and social networking promises. Make sure your advocacy system can handle the basics first. Message delivery will always king. Good luck with your future advocacy efforts!