District-based
Phone2Action, a digital grassroots advocacy platform that lets anyone contact his or her elected officials via smartphone, recently rolled out version 3.0 of its suite of tools that associations and companies like the American Heart Association and Lyft use to mobilize their supporters.
The basic Phone2Action concept is a way to let anyone email, SMS or tweet at their elected officials. The platform uses some basic location information to automatically determine which local, state or federal politicians should get the message.
"Organizations spend a lot of time and money getting people to advocate for their causes," says Jeb Ory, who cofounded the company in 2012 with Ximena Hartsock and Patrick Stoddart. "Typically, after a speech at conference, people are fired up and the speaker says … 'Contact your elected official.' We provide a platform for people to [contact] officials at events, directly from their phone," before that energy and momentum is lost.
New in version 3.0 are enhancements that individual advocates might never see, but which make it easier for organizations to manage their campaigns, like a mobile-responsive dashboard.
"Up until now, mobile advocacy has been very Web 1.0," says Ory. "Mobile responsiveness didn't exist in the advocacy world."
Another new feature lets users switch with one click between messages thanking their elected officials for supporting a given measure and messages asking for those officials to change their position—helpful when a user has multiple congressional representatives or city council members to contact.
Phone2Action currently has between 75 to 100 clients including the aforementioned American Heart Association and Lyft, as well as the Georgia Charter School Administration and the Consumer Electronics Association. Individuals are never charged to access the platform; associations and nonprofits pay a monthly subscription fee based on the size of their client database. "We want to be fair to all different sizes of organizations," Ory says.
The company, which raised a $625,000 seed round led by
Dundee Venture Capital in Omaha, NE, has six full-time employees and is now looking to bring on a
VP of engineering. Ory adds that the company has several marketing, sales and customer service hires slated for Q1 and Q2 of next year.