Why POPVOX?
Heritage Action provides a service called PopVox, which enables you to send your email to Members of Congress.

POPVOX helps congressional staff by including specific information on the bill you want to support or oppose, as well as your information so they can easily respond. PopVox also has the option to post those messages in public, showing members of the media and others what a district or state thinks about a bill.

Penny4NASA loves Popvox.

For decades (if not longer), contacting elected officials in American democracy has always been a somewhat anti-climatic, lackluster affair. A representative or senator may or may not get a letter, a phone call, or an email in time for an important vote. Or at the very least be able to use those slow responses to understand completely how the public feels about an issue. Letters (snail mail) take time to arrive at their destination and phone calls and emails tend to be screened. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a pre-internet democracy because there must always be a kind of lag-effect on understanding public sentiment.

This is no longer the case. Popvox is the 21st century equivalent of all the letter writing, phone calling, and public campaigning that has been done in the past. Popvox uses the internet to deliver not just real time interactions with your elected officials, but also real time feedback FOR those elected officials, meaning that they can see and understand how the public feels about an issue AND be able to capitalize on that information effectively. This is such a positive change from the status quo, that Congress has decided to make their use of Popvox official.

3. PopVox MarkUp : This app allows you to search for legislation via a keyword or bill number. Once you find the bill, you can get a cosponsor list by party, a list of organizations for and against the bill and the bill’s text. You can also share the bill text on social media sites including Facebook and Twitter. You will need to create an account to use. $9.99.

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.

As in real life, where one can talk about politics at work, about their work at the dinner table, and about their family life in a town hall, one can share different kinds of information across different social media sites. But as in real life, we are also getting to a point where we have distinct places online to bring to the forefront our civic, social, and professional identities and, at our own discretion, choose to reveal or conceal those identities to friends, coworkers, neighbors, and elected representatives as we deem appropriate.

This has been one of the promises of digital social media all along. We are finally seeing that promise realized.