A Year of 5 Calls
Did you make your voice heard?
Rebecca and I registered 5calls.org on November 20th, 2016. Like many people, we returned from working the campaign on November 9th in defeat. We expected to return to our normal lives for the next four years but plans we had made before the election felt insignificant. We knew we had to do more than just tweet our outrage.
It didn’t take more than a few days to come up with a plan for what would become 5 Calls. We rallied around the idea and started to turn our mourning into a period of hope and productivity as we built something we thought would be helpful to citizens around the country.
We thought we would be lucky to make a couple thousand calls together, even just as an outlet for the rage burning inside many people at the time. But there’s always that little voice that wonders what we could do if this was really popular. We had the best intentions but no idea if this idea would survive for a day or a week or a month, let alone an entire year.
So it’s easy to say that 5 Calls has surpassed our initial hopes for what it could be. But 5 Calls isn’t anything without the thousands of people who actually make calls to their elected representatives — that’s you. So here are a few numbers about your first year with 5 Calls:
- Total calls made: 2,000,000+
- Public officials called: 635+ (your House and Senate Reps, Governors, Attorneys General, Secretaries of State and more!)
- Issues researched and written up by our policy team: 370+
- Volunteers who joined our Slack: 113
- Healthcare fights won: 3
- Postcards sent to voters: 15,000+
- 5-star app reviews: 451+
What’s in store for 5 Calls in Year 2?
A whole damn lot. We’ll continue to provide scripts to help you contact your elected officials about the most relevant national issues of the moment. You’ll still be able to visit us every day or every week and easily know what’s going on, what you’ve already called about, and what needs your attention next. We’ll still provide a way for new activists to get on the phone with their elected representatives for the first time.
But we also want to grow and ultimately drive more calls and feedback to representatives at every level of government. That’s why we’re opening up 5 Calls as a platform for any organization to direct calls about the issues that matter to them.
5 Calls, For Every City and State
We can only keep track of so much national legislation, even with the processes and tools in place that we’ve developed for our volunteers over the last year. People ask us constantly about when we’re going to cover local and state issues. And the honest response is that right now, we can’t.
But you can. Or more specifically, local progressive civic organizations can. And we can help by giving you the tools we’ve used over the last year to drive more than 2 million calls to Congress and other elected representatives.
Everyone, from a few friends who care about a single issue, to an Indivisible group in a small town, to a large advocacy organization should have the ability to collectively lobby their political representatives at every level of government and track their impact.
Calls affect politics on the national level when they arrive in crushing, overwhelming numbers. However, at a state or local level, a few dozen calls can have a similarly powerful effect. This kind of call volume is easy to mobilize with a tool like 5 Calls.
Now organizations will be able to have a Team on 5 Calls where you can track your impact together. You can make it casual and call on the national issues that the 5 Calls policy team researches and writes or you can write your own issues, directing your team members to call national, state and local elected representatives.
We’re testing local and state calling functionality out with a few folks right now, and we’ll be talking about this in more detail shortly. If your group is interested in getting this early, shoot us an email and we’ll chat.
The Internet, Calling Together
5 Calls is not exactly a phone bank, but it did grow from our experiences running phone banks. One of the things that kept people coming back to phone banks was the social experience. Even if you had a shitty experience with one call, having other people make calls alongside you helps you laugh it off with your friends and continue making a difference.
Callers make change when their voices are a consistent presense in their elected representatives’ offices. To make change on more issues, we need to make our voices heard regularly, and we need to make a habit out of calling our representatives about the things that matter to us.
I’m as guilty of falling behind on consistently calling as anyone. But I think there’s a lot to do to improve how we make ourselves accountable to our friends so we feel like we’re calling together as one unified front, rather than at home by ourselves.
If the internet is great at one thing, it’s connecting people with shared interests across vast distances. 5 Calls does an OK job at this, but it’s one obvious area where we can improve by connecting you with other people who are calling about the same issues.
However, adding internet strangers into your existing routine isn’t a recipe for success by itself. It needs to be positive and resilient against the partisan bickering that makes places like Twitter feel like the space between conservative and liberal lines at a protest. And it’s why we didn’t just slap a comment area on every issue page.
But we’re quickly approaching the point of rolling out some great features here. Stay tuned for this!
More of the Great Stuff You Love
Finally, we did a lot of great work this year that we can make even better. It can be hard to prioritize when you’re as new as 5 Calls and still getting used to what works and what doesn’t. But looking back on our first year has made a few things clear; we did a few things really well that we can continue working on in Year 2:
We should communicate more. Not everything we want to say fits in our short policy write-ups, and demystifying details of what’s going on in government is surprisingly bread and butter for us. The amount of feedback we get on making hard-to-understand topics simple to grasp has been more substantial than we expected it to be, and we can double down on giving people the context they want about how government works.
We should collaborate more. We’ve met a ton of great people working on ways to connect you with your government this year. We worked with Mobilize America to bring you a phone bank for Danica Roem, with Town Hall Project to get you face-to-face with your reps, and with YouTube star Tyler Oakley to make your voice heard on LGBTQ issues. We can make a much bigger impact when we work with smart folks who know a lot about a particular domain and we’re going to be doing a lot more of it in Year 2.
Finally, 5 Calls could not have accomplished any of these things without the incredible support of our volunteers for policy research, writing, editing, social media, design, code, and so much more. More than 100 folks have helped out along the way and we want to publicly acknowledge those who have stuck with us for the long haul: Rati Gupta, Eleanor Wertman, Jessica Irvine, Rachel “piebob” Perkins, Sierra Slettvet, Rhiannon Woo, Amanda Nottke, Sara Gong, Adair Gerke, Craig Doremus, Ben Scheirman and Katie Dektar.
There are so many more friends who have helped out along the way. And room for more! Maybe even you will be on this list next year.
Are you a policy wonk with no outlet? A nerd who wants to make a difference in politics? A super rich person who wants to put your endless piles of cash to good use? 5 Calls Civic Action is a 501(c)4 non-profit that helps connect people with their elected representatives about issues they care about, and we’re always looking for volunteers or donations to help accomplish our goals — Say hi!
