CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Trishah:

Yes, it helps. I hope I can too, even though there is no perfect, complete, free solution that meets all your needs.  FWIW, for almost 8 years I did the technology for an advocacy org, from startup to .... well, 8 years. Here is what I learned about not just the technology end of things, but also public policy advocacy:

1. In order of effectiveness re: influencing legislation, personal visits to an elected official are better than phone calls are better than faxes are better than e-mails. (No one sends snail mail any more because it takes so long to be security screened.)

2. That said, an advocacy organization that simply encourages visits/calls will never know how effective it is, because there is no realistic way to track these things. Faxes and e-mails processed via the org's site or software can be tracked, which is why most advocacy groups use some sort of advocacy system to "rally the troops." In the vast majority of cases these systems are hosted and fee-based, because ...

3. As far as I am aware, there is no open source advocacy system at all, let alone one that will integrate with Drupal and CiviCRM, that is capable of sending a communication to a legislator from a constituent. The Sunlight module *will* match a user to her/his members of Congress, and it *can* in most cases provide a link to the legislator's webform, but that kind of contact can't be tracked because the user has already left your site, so you don't really have any way to assess how effective you are. Also: pretty sure cd_Sunlight does not currently support state legislatures, only U.S. Congress.  From your description of the state-by-state approach re: federal legislation I'm a little unclear if that is or isn't a problem for you. In any case, Sunlight may just be an "extra" for your people - an easy way to do a little more than sign your petition.

4. Also as far as I'm aware, CiviPetition appears to be a work-in-progress, not a finished product: see http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviPetition  -- do you have more info?

5. Based on the above, here are 2 options I could see possibly working for you, unless I'm off or out-of-date on something:

OPTION I.  Use CiviCRM and these Drupal modules: Webform, Webform_CiviCRM, cd_Sunlight, and Views. You'd use Webform_CiviCRM to create each state's petition. This is Coleman's very powerful module which will easily handle #1-4 of your list. #5 would be handled by cd_Sunlight (the version I am running, not the standard one -- more on this later).  You'd create a "state coordinator" role and synch that with a CiviCRM group of the same name. Smart groups would take care of grouping petition signers by state and this would help you with targeted e-mails. Views would handle displaying the petition sigs, either publicly or privately. Either way, the appropriate legislator(s) would simply be contacted once and sent a URL to see the petition signatures. There would be no automated communication between your site or its activists and the legislators.

OPTION II. Use a hosted advocacy solution such as Democracy in Action's Salsa. ($100-200 a month to start, last I checked.)  In this scenario you'd handle all petitions, calls to action, e-mails, and legislative advocacy via Salsa. There would be no direct connection between your primary domain (which could be Drupal, but wouldn't have to be) and the advocacy database, which you'd access via Salsa's reporting and querying GUI. Your activists would be able to contact legislators directly from the Salsa pages you set up and you'd be able to track those actions. Your grouping by state and your state coordinator role would be accommodated by Salsa as well. You would not use CiviCRM.

Each of these options has pros and cons ... but I believe each one is pretty close to achieving some version of what you're trying to accomplish. I know this is throwing a lot at you, so feel free to ask questions or correct me if I've misunderstood something!

m.e.

Just checked out Popvox. Interesting. If CiviCRM integration is going to be developed, keep in mind that not all advocacy orgs consistently deal with specific bills. In many cases there is a desire to "thank" or "spank" an elected official for a position already taken, or to express an opinion about a policy that Congress is not currently addressing. (One important focus of the org I worked with involves government practices that were actually brought about  by executive order in a previous administration ... only rarely has this ever been addressed via a bill, and the target of such activism is more typically the executive branch, or in some cases an agency head.)

I couldn't see that Popvox would actually send a user's communication (e-mail/FAX) to a specific legislator, though, and track that action. That's the real gap in open source advocacy solutions (the one I refer to in #3). It seems to operate on a different model than most advocacy organizations currently work, by aggregating bill information and support/opposition across orgs (not per org - did I understand that correctly?).

As the blog implies, it's true that automated e-advocacy would involve a non-trivial amount of webform parsing for someone, especially at the beginning of new terms -- I don't know how this would fly in an open source community except in a for-profit partnership of some kind. There's generally a big crunch that has to happen very quickly when a new Congress opens; it's not a volunteer or make-it-happen kind of situation.