Future:Media:Change

You have a great advocacy campaign, your supporters are activated, your web site looks great, and you get thousands of people to sign an online petition that emails elected officials. But nothing happens, why?

The effect email campaigns have on members of Congress has dramatically slipped. Congressmen receive thousands of messages per day, and staffers are reticent to take notice of yet another email campaign. But asking your supporters to write a letter would cause a dramatic drop in participation. What can be done?

A new tool called 2gov addresses this very problem. 2gov will hand deliver postcards with your email or even tweet to your local, state, or federal officials. You don’t need to know anyone’s name, just plug your zip code into the system and 2gov will handle the rest.

Anyone doing advocacy work should be pretty psyched about a tool like this. Having the ability to directly send postcards to representatives with almost no effort on the part of your members is a very, very cool thing.

I’d love to see this tool open their API to allow nonprofits to incorporate the functionality directly into their web sites. Imagine a petition that wasn’t just a collection of signatures but you knew was actually going to be hand delivered to Congress.