CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We're looking at switching to CiviCRM and associated tools, but one question we have is whether it can cover our  current advocacy tools needs.

On a fairly regular basis we do both petitions (where someone simply adds their name to something) but also 'speak outs' — getting people to write to their local MP/councillor/whatever.

For the latter we need to be able to cross reference to work out who their appropriate representative is, and to have the text entry with suggestions/example letter alongside it, have people write their letter, and then have the appropriate details added to said letter, and it sent on to the recipient (with us keeping a copy of what they've sent). After they've completed that, it's useful to be able to send them elsewhere in our site.

Finally, for both we need to be able to mass email people about these actions, and we need to be able to track this information; assign attributes to people based on the speakouts/signups they've done, so we can then go back to them on follow ups, so we can find out who our particularly 'warm' supporters are, who've participated in many actions, and so forth.

If it's a combination of CiviCRM and other stuff that'd give us the ability to do this, that's fine as long as it all works together sufficiently well.

I think that's a good summary of our needs there, if I think of anything I've missed out, I'll add it later.

Hi,

For petition, civicrm would works pretty much out of the box, either using the civicampaign petition tool or webform-civicrm integration (on drupal).

For the speakout, the problem is more specific because the rule to select the target is obviously specific. MP: You are in the uk right? I think they are open apis that allows you to find your representative based on your zipcode. We worked on something like that for the green party.

I do recall that it was fairly tricky and we had to find the ward first and that the rules (eg. for the MEPs are different based on the region, itself changing based on the phase of the moon, or whatever they were smoking when they wrote it).

Anyway, finding which one should be targeted is probably going to be specific for each of your type of campaign.

You will need a bit of custom development to add the following steps after the speak out form:
- find the target (a civicrm contact, eg. MP)
- create an activity "speakout" to that contact, created by your supporter contact (so you can find both the activity under the MP and your supporter) as part of your campaign and send the email to the target

You can leverage a fair bit of civicrm features, eg. each of these activities will have the link to the campaign and supporter and target, so you could find how many participated to a specific action, or if one is a super active supporter.

That's an interesting project. Do you plan to dev internally? Would be great to share the result, most could be make generic I suspect.

P.S. We have a dev training at the end of the month in gent, might be something you want to attend to get a clearer idea how to write the specific parts?

Hi,

What's the url of the page in the wiki?