Using sign-on letters to petition legislators

If you are looking to write a sign-on letter to a legislator that your members and supporters can sign on to, there are several options available. Below are some options I have encountered that allow you to petition legislators.

Free hosted petition services

The advantages of using a hosted petition service is that it does not require any technical skill. Reporting tools are frequently made available from these services.

  • I found CitizenSpeak.org to be very simple to use. It has great reporting tools – I was able to download a spreadsheet with the following information: the number of letters sent; who sent them (including their contact info); and how the letter may have been customized by senders.
  • Change.org is another service, and they have good advice for writing a sign-on letter to representatives.

Host your own petition service in WordPress

This is my favored approach. It appeals to my inner control-freak. Reporting is available (similar to CitizenSpeak above). It can be hosted directly on your organizational website.

I have used it twice – once for Great Streets ABQ and once for the Main Street Alliance. I have been able to store the results in a text file which can be imported into Excel.

When your petition is ready

To encourage people to use the sign-on letter, I would:

  • Link to it from your organizational website.
  • Send an email blast to the sign-on letter.
  • Tweet your followers and encourage them to re-tweet.
  • Link to it from your organization’s Facebook page.
  • Link to it from your organization’s MySpace page.
  • Find a blog post related to the subject of your sign-on letter and include a link to the petition within a comment. (Make sure to write something relevant to the post, do not just include link.)

Have you used any of these options before? What have been your experiences? Do you know of a better way to petition legislators? Let me know, comment and share below!

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5 Comments

  1. Posted July 28, 2009 at 7:29 am | Permalink

    FTW!

  2. mac
    Posted May 30, 2010 at 1:53 pm | Permalink

    I tried the wp petition plugin and it seems to work bet here is where I get stuck; where is the confirmation Url that I need to insert into the emails so that people can confirm? Is it a page I create specially for it?

  3. Posted June 1, 2010 at 10:08 am | Permalink

    Hi Mac, I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but it sounds like, yes – you would create a confirmation page. Do you mind clarifying a bit? Maybe a link to check out?

  4. Posted September 1, 2011 at 8:43 am | Permalink

    I’m looking for this exact feature, but my website is on squarespace, not wordpress. Any ideas on how to get a customizable sign-on form onto my website that can be sent to two recipients?
    I’ve been searching for a few days now and can’t find anything. Please help!

  5. Posted September 1, 2011 at 9:11 am | Permalink

    Hi Carolina,

    Thanks for the question. I don’t know a ton about Squarespace. It’s a hosted solution isn’t it? If so, I doubt the “Secure Form Mailer” is right for you unless you can upload your own php files onto their servers.

    Here are some options that I see for you:
    – use a service that someone else provides, like CitizenSpeak.org or Change.org (updated link here) mentioned in the article
    – create some php files using a script like that provided by Secure PHP Form Mailer (updated link here) that you can then customize & convert into something more petition-like.

    Either way, your petition would almost certainly NOT live on your Squarespace site directly, but would be something that you link to – like any other external site.

    Hope this helps!

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