Getting Started with VisitThem

As digital organizers, it’s easy to get stuck in our ways. In large part, it’s because we can only do what the technology allows us to do — and the digital advocacy tools that have evolved over the last 20 years have been built to facilitate a relatively narrow set of tactics: send a lot of email, generate a lot of clicks that lead people to sign petitions or donate or, less frequently, make phone calls to decision makers or show up at events.

None of this is bad. The internet has enabled a vast number of people to come into the political process, and on a daily basis, we are able to keep up with and engage in the goings on of government in a way that was never before imaginable.

But to an extent, it’s become routine. While a petition with 100,000 signatures may have caught lawmakers’ attention 15 years ago, today it hardly makes a splash. Emails and phone calls at most get tallied as hash marks on a list. And while most of these tactics are easy to do, they are also performed mostly in isolation, from our laptops and phones — stretching the meaning of “engagement.”

Donald Trump’s election upended much of the conventional political wisdom. At ControlShift, where we are on a mission to build tools that use the best of digital to empower deeper offline organizing, we also realized we needed something different.

While lots of activism energy has been directed at Washington, we saw an untapped resource in the hundreds of local congressional offices in home districts across the country. Rather than impersonal petitions, emails, and calls, could we do a better job of mobilizing face-to-face contact between activists, lawmakers, and their district staff?

Organizations have occasionally organized local lobby visits — but generally with a painstaking process of setting up meetings, identifying hosts, and recruiting attendees. Without a lot of staff time and effort, it just doesn’t scale.

At most of these offices, though, constituents can just walk in! They won’t usually get a sit-down meeting with the congressperson or even a legislative aide, but they can still deliver a message through the receptionist and drop off a handwritten note. These offices are usually pretty quiet places — so a sudden stream of constituents showing up is almost sure to be noticed.

An office visit is also something that happens offline, out of the house and in the community, and is very much a part of the deep engagement that we need to rebuild and sustain in order to effect lasting progressive change.

And so we built VisitThem, a tool that makes it easy for organizations to set up campaigns that let their supporters search for the nearest local office, commit to a time to visit, receive issue-specific talking points and tips to make it successful, and report back on how it went.

Adopting new tactics means breaking out of our old routines. We’ve never met a campaigner who wasn’t overextended, so to help with that, we’ve put together a step-by-step organizing guide that walks through scenarios and tips for local office visit campaigns. Check out the guide here.

You can also sign up for a free VisitThem trial anytime.