A blog supporting the Rally Congress community.
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Currently, 137 members of the House and Senate require a phone number in order to process an incoming email. The Rally Congress system asks for this information at the last step before sending, and only if one of the user’s officials requires it.
By popular demand, Rally Congress now tells users which Representatives and/or Senators are requiring a phone number. Here’s a shot of the new interface in action:
Oprah and even President Obama are now on Twitter, so Rally Congress is working to help you join the conversation in more effective ways.
“Hash tags” are one way Twitter users organize discussions. Now, Rally Congress petition managers can also create hash tags for their organization and petitions, and Rally Congress will automatically insert those tags when site visitors post to Twitter from a petition page.
This should significantly expand the audience for your petition on Twitter!
You create a hash tag simply by prefixing a short word or abbreviation with a hash symbol: #hashtag. Tags should be used sparingly— one is fine and never more than two or three for your organization or issue. A good approach is to come up with a specific hash tag for your campaign or organization, and add a second one for your more general issue set.
A great resource to search for existing tags and track the progress of your hash tags is http://hashtags.org.
6 months agoNotice the “Bookmark” button at the top right of your petition pages?
A new report in your Rally Congress control panel tracks when users click one of these “bookmark” or “share” links. When the user clicks on the link it carries them to the third party site (i.e. Facebook) and pre-populates that site’s submit form with your petition link.
Links from popular sites back to your petitions will increase your traffic and improve your ranking with search engines. This new report gives you a good idea of which social networking sites are popular with your users and which might need more attention.
Here’s a screenshot to give you some of flavor:
This weekend Scott Murphy was declared the winner in a tight special election in this Albany-area district. The office became vacant when the governor appointed Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to fill New York’s junior Senate seat. Once Representative-elect Murphy is seated, there will only be one vacancy in the House (CA -32), and one in the Senate— the Minnesota Senate battle continues in the courts.
6 months agoA great time was had by all! Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth and to the organizers of the conference at George Washington University and Campaigns & Elections. See you again next year!
Yesterday Congress swore in the Honorable Mike Quigley, who fills the open 5th District of Illinois after winning a special election earlier this month. The seat became open when Rep. Rahm Emanuel joined the Obama Administration last winter. Congrats to Rep. Quigley— we’ve got a backlog of letters waiting for you!
7 months agoWe’ve just finished two days at the annual Politics Online Conference in downtown Washington, DC, where we sponsored and had a table to demo the Rally Congress platform. We had a great time. Photos and details to follow!
7 months agoClients logging in to their control panel may notice a few changes today. We’ve created a new box for “System-wide” adjustments that impact all pages on your site. These include uploading a logo or header image, changing the color scheme of your Rally Congress pages and title text, and editing the default forward-to-friend text. Hopefully this improved layout will make managing the system even easier!
7 months agoThe Rally Congress team was up before dawn yesterday as we migrated the entire technical platform and all client databases to a new set of servers. We did the move on the holiday to minimize the disruption and downtime, and to do it when the system was least busy.
The move was smooth and the result are web pages that are even faster than ever! The new capactity will also allow us to handle even heavier weekday peak load. The migration is part of our long-term investment plan and will support new features for you in 2009.
7 months agoWe’ve just added support for Guam zip codes and emails to Congresswoman Bordallo after several requests from Guam residents. Of course, for U.S. servicemen and women temporarily serving abroad, the best thing is to send email to the officials representing your permanent address.
Guam, of course, is a U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean— “Where America’s Day Begins!”
7 months ago