CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Sorry for the late reply, folks...

It's true that some zips straddle more than one legislative district, but the vast majority don't (some states only have one district).

I couldn't see where the Activism Sunlight integration has been released yet, so I'm attaching is a script that will populate a field of your choice in the civicrm_contact table with a legislative district state and number (e.g. "CO1", "NY12").  This uses the Sunlight Labs API's getDistrictsFromZip function.  It's a total hack, but it works in a pinch.

To use:

- Register for a Sunlight Labs API key:  http://services.sunlightlabs.com/api/register/.
- Set the variables in the attached file.  For $target_field I've used legal_identifier, but any blank field will do.
- Drop this on your web server and rename with a .php extension (preferably in a password-protected dir).
- Open the file in your web browser or wget from the command line.

Once you've populated all the records for which you have zips, you might need to run some queries to add contacts living in the districts you want to hit to separate groups; then you send email blasts to these groups.  Yes, you'll have to requery each time you want to do legislative district-focused emails.  And yes, for big lists this will take a long time.

Warnings:

-  Don't use this unless you know what you're doing.
-  Back up your db first!

Areas for Improvement:

-  Sunlight has a query that returns results by latitude/longitude.  That would perhaps be more accurate than a zip code when used with geocoded records.
-  Sunlight also has a getZipsFromDistrict function.  This would be useful if you only want to tag records for targeted districts, rather than updating your entire list.
-  If only targeting a few districts it would be easy to programmatically drop these records right into groups.  (If you're a national org, you wouldn't want 538 separate groups muddling up your db!)

We've also got some code that creates a nice little tool to allow users to look up their legislators by zip.  The result links right through to the legislators' online contact forms.  If folks are interested I can post that too.

Activism module folks:  we've got some other code we're running that effectively creates civicrm-integrated online petitions; we're going to be integrating this with some neat-o e-mail functions.  Would love to work with you on maybe building some of this into your next release.

Enjoy!

In Colorado, 9 digit zips define political districts, but 5 digit zips frequently span.

How about Zipcode Plus 4? Seems like that would further isolate an address down to the cluster of street level. Would that not then map to a particular legislative district?

What about ZipCode+4 values? As I understand it, the 9 digits take you down to the carrier route level, which may be a single street or neighborhood. Would that not be sufficient to identify a specific legislative district? Of course, this would vary from state to state, depending on the gerrymandering at work. But on the whole, I would expect that it would be a reasonable way to identify the district information. Obviously, you would then need a zipcode lookup table and some code to read it. However, the performance should be pretty good, since you would only have to do a single lookup to get the districts to display. Anybody tried this approach?