What to do when you Give A Damn

Introducing CivikOwl — drive change on issues you care about

Has this happened to you recently? You read an article — on an issue close to your heart like criminal justice or education reform or healthcare costs — that gets you angry and ready to do something. But you’re not exactly sure what to do.

Most people give up at this point.

Yet there are many examples of individuals making an impact and driving real change by speaking up and organizing with other concerned citizens. But this remains a rarity because people don’t know where to start.

Today we are announcing the launch of CivikOwl — a free tool to address this problem and make it easy for people to figure out what actions to take on issues that are important to them.

Here’s what it does…

1. Personalize your outreach to your elected officials

In a system where the volume of messages often determine an official’s priority, highly-personalized messages can often break through the noise. This is true regardless of your official’s party affiliation.

We often fixate on federal level politics and what the president does but for many issues your state officials impact your life far more than you realize. And state officials receive less correspondence (particularly at their district office) than federal officials so they often respond with more tailored messages.

Some other considerations:

• It’s not a good use of anyone’s time to contact an elected official if you’re not in their district.
• Appointed officials, such as agency heads, are worth contacting but again, go local as much as you can.

Overwhelmed? Yeah, us too. That’s why we developed CivikOwl which automatically provides your officials’ names and contact information based on your location.

Below is an example article that has CivikOwl’s Give A Damn button. Here’s what you do:

1. Click the article below and read it.
2. Click on the Give A Damn button. See which of your elected officials most closely handles the issues address in the article.
3. Message your officials with the handy guide.
4. That’s it. We’ll tell you when your message is opened and read by the official’s office.

2. Get smarter on which organizations to support

Two out of every three households donate to charity every year, and for good reason.

• They can pool together individual voices and money to accomplish more.
• They are experts in their focus areas and know how to affect change, including via legal means if necessary.
• Their impact is often faster than legislative options.
• Local chapters of charities tend to know how to serve their communities better than larger charities.
• They can be an alternative to legislative options, particularly if your official disagrees with your understanding of the issue.

But there’s a problem: it’s difficult to know which organization to support — what’s the charity’s track record? What’s the impact of my donation?

The Give A Damn button does this tedious work and automatically finds highly-rated charities so people can donate with confidence in just a couple of clicks.

3. Help others Give A Damn

The next time you’re fired up after reading an article and it doesn’t have a clear call-to-action, add the Give A Damn button to it at Civikowl.com so you can do something immediately and easily.

Then share that link so every reader can connect with their officials, or donate to high performing charities, and address the issues raised in the article.

There are many ways to affect change in the U.S. Each of you has three levels of government representatives, countless appointed officials, a bevy of effective charities, community groups, a powerful judiciary and more. CivikOwl’s goal is to help you determine how to tap into the right channel for the issue you care about. If we can play a role in increasing the overall engagement rate of the population that is a success.

We’re going to add much more to the CivikOwl platform to help you engage and drive change so let us know what you want!

In the meantime, if you want to get in touch with your officials any time you read an article that upsets you download our Chrome extension.