Advocacy and Public Policy Work in Canada with CiviCRM?

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adixon's picture

Who uses Drupal and CiviCRM to support advocacy and/or public policy work in Canada?

I've got a module here: https://drupal.org/project/civinorth
that I've been using on a number of sites for about a year and a half, and I'd be interested in helping others make use of it as well.

It's designed for a fairly specific meaning of 'advocacy' on a website - i.e., it facilitates communication from your organization's constituency (contacts in CiviCRM) with elected representatives (MPs, MPPs, city councillors).

I know there are some CiviCRM components (CiviCampaign and CiviEngage) which might be complementary bits, but I haven't used them.

What other kinds of advocacy work is going on in Canada that is supported by CiviCRM and/or Drupal?

Comments

I've always wondered if there

dalin's picture

I've always wondered if there was a service like this for Canada. It might be possible to integrate this with
https://drupal.org/project/cd_sunlight

--


Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his

re: sunlight, etc.

adixon's picture

Yes, the sunlight project was an inspiration, but I'd forgotten about it. The api looks kind of similar so your module might have some useful bits, thanks.

I also want to keep the discussion from getting bogged down in questions of how to implement a specific kind of technology (e.g. postal code to riding lookup). I think the opportunity to use the Internet/Drupal/CiviCRM to support advocacy work is bigger than any specific narrow technology.

I had a excellent chat with Eric Squair who helped develop this Drupal non-CiviCRM option: http://www.citizensconnected.com/

He also pointed out that Nation Builder is now a big player in this area -- to the point where it's becoming the specification.

I came away from that conversation thinking that one reason this is hard is because advocacy is a long standing and complex human activity, so some things that advocacy campaigners want and do and talk about are by no means trivial to implement. Much of this relates to the whole "ladder of engagement" concept that is really central to any successful strategy. Figuring out the machine analogues of those steps is hard, once you get beyond the simple first versions.

And since I'm on a tear here - I also want to implore coders to try to name and document your work carefully. "Campaign" means so many different things in different contexts, you can't write a general purpose "campaign" tool without that being way too abstract. Let's solve specific communication problems that exist in the real world ...

Civicanada

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