Our Summer Recess Mission

This summer’s upcoming congressional recesses present both a challenge and an opportunity to advocacy organizations. Representatives are leaving DC, where many advocacy groups are headquartered, and returning to their districts, where their constituents and your organization’s members live.

We’re on a mission to make sure that these summer recesses are ones Congress will not forget. We’ve been hard at work continuing to build infrastructure that allows your organization to mobilize your members toward in-person action. Now that legislators are about to return to their districts during the July 4th and August recesses, we’ve added more robust congressional town hall support to our district office visits tool.

A lot goes into making in-person lobbying campaigns easy and efficient for your organization:

Town Hall Data
We scour the web for data about when congressional town halls are happening — searching a variety of sources 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We’ve written automated tools to scrape official .gov sites and congressional Facebook feeds, in addition to using data crowd-sourced by volunteer activist organizations like Town Hall Project and our own users. Our goal is to have the most comprehensive and up-to-date data set of these events.

Campaign Tools for Organizations
We’ll always include all of our data in the public VisitThem.org lookup tool, but our tools for organizations allow your organization to have its own site that reflects your branding, campaign specific content, and organization-specific data reporting. We’ll continue to invest in making these tools a powerful organizing platform for you, as you encourage your members to take action in-person.

APIs and Data Export
While we’re proud of our self-serve platform and believe that it is a good match for most organizations, we’re also aware that you might have unique requirements or want to create a bespoke experience. We offer organizations the ability to export a CSV of congressional events on a self-service basis, which can then be imported into other systems. We also offer an API (currently in beta, get in touch for details) that allows organizations to build custom experiences connecting their members to events or district offices in novel ways — for example, we know of one group planning to engage their audience via a chat bot.

We’re excited to be helping to power so much resistance to the Trump agenda this summer, and we cannot wait to see what you are able to accomplish using these tools. Our goal, as always, is to connect your members with meaningful ways to influence the political process and engage more deeply with your organization’s issues. We believe that opportunities for in-person action are some of the best ways to achieve that mission.

Get started by signing up as an organization on VisitThem.org