The International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) needed to be able to target and deliver our constituent's comments on Congressional Bills to Senators and Representatives. Thanks to this blog post we found PopVox and thanks to the good folks at PopVox, CiviCRM and PopVox are now integrated.
PopVox's advocacy tools enable organizations, like IMBA, to embed a customizable Write Congress widget directly onto an organization-branded website so grassroots activists can send messages to Congress, which POPVOX delivers and then aggregates into graphical statistics of support of and oppostion to a particular bill.
Things that define PopVox's service:
- Take action forms (widgets) can be embedded into an organization's website using an iframe
- PopVox inserts contact information from the constituent taking action into CivCRM using the CiviCRM API (v3, JSON)
- PopVox verifies both postal address and email address of constituents to ensure the quality of information delivered to Congress
- Delivery of constituent messages is guaranteed
- The aggregates of bill support and opposition are openly available on PopVox.com
- PopVox requires a user to create an account at PopVox so individuals returning to POPVOX may check the status of their letter and bill
- Widgets and message must be tied to a bill in Congress.
- There are free and paid "Pro" options -- CiviCRM integration is only availalable with paid options
Integration with CiviCRM is pretty straight forward. Organizations register for an account at PopVox and create a widget in support or oppostion to a bill. The embed code is inserted into a page on the organization's site. Using a username and password provided by the organziation, PopVox utilizes the CiviCRM API to add new and update existing contacts. Additionally an organization can pass data to the PopVox widget to pre-populate user information. An example of populating the email field of the widget in Drupal is below.
Here is a great starting point for finding out more about PopVox and their service:
https://www.popvox.com/about/whyitworks
$user->mail,
/*
"first_name" => "",
"last_name" => "",
"zipcode" => "",
"prefix" => "",
"suffix" => "",
"address1" => "",
"address2" => "",
"city" => "",
"state" => "",
"phonenumber" => "",
*/
// Use this only if the user has been logged in with a username and password
"authentication_hmac" => hash_hmac("sha256", $user->mail, "8362CV9WSSYD72HQ"),
);
echo "#user_info=" . urlencode(http_build_query($user_info, "", "&"));
