CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm new at this, so tell me if this is the wrong place to post, or if this idea has already been dismissed. My organization would be willing to pay for a way to integrate the "Advocacy Campaign" functionality we're currently leasing from Democracy in Action into a Drupal/civiCRM site. Right now DiA is a hosted solution that allows our supporters to contact their U.S. elected officials (or other target we specify) from a Web form within a template identical to our site's. We also use it to do email blasts about those campaigns. I have been told this kind of system must connect to a Congressional contacts database (apparently there is a steep annual fee) and must have a way to emulate the Web forms of legislators, so it's clear this would be an involved project limited just to the U.S. and perhaps not suited for open source development? However, we are currently paying $200 a month with the prospect of higher fees as our list grows and, more importantly, DiA has not provided us a way to corral all of our contacts, donors, activists, etc. into one location. I don't know if a paid module integrating with open source is anathema, but if some company were interested in such a project, I feel there would be customers -- starting with us.

Thanks! You know, I saw this about a month back and sent the info to staff with the remark that real progress is being made toward a full advocacy solution. I may go ahead and get this installed for the info it'll provide staff about our donors' representation, at least. Re: future growth, I do think the "email your rep from our website" functionality is going to be a challenge for someone now that Congressional offices have gone to webforms ... but I hope someone is up to the task. 

GOTV looks interesting - look forward to seeing the rollout. My group's mission central, for now, is direct and grassroots lobbying. If there were a fully integrated way to email elected officials from a CiviCRM campaign page, we'd be thrilled. I've been told that turnover from elections can generate large new cohorts of web forms to be parsed, since few reps accept direct emails these days. This would be significant & ongoing maintenance that may be unsuitable for an open source project -- I don't know. If someone has more knowledge about this than I do and there is forward movement on such a project, I can help with specs and testing and I'm decent at documentation, but I can almost guarantee there are better candidates for writing the code.