Find answers and general information quickly.
Advocacy Quickstart:
Advocacy Quickstart is a rapid response advocacy solution that provides a way for companies, nonprofits, and individuals to launch lightly branded lawmaker messaging campaigns that can be up in minutes. Use this product if you need a quick and easy solution for facilitating lawmaker messaging.
Advocacy Impact:
Advocacy Impact is a comprehensive tool for organizing and executing your advocacy efforts. It’s a great fit for organizations who do multiple campaigns, who have multiple asks or actions from their audience, who are looking to deepen their connection with their supporters and more. It includes all the Quickstart features as well as advanced analytics, user story collection, a fully-branded action center, an integrated CRM and much more. It also includes features to increase engagement, like gamification and re-engagement, and comes with dedicated support from a strategist and priority support.
Read a detailed breakdown of Advocacy Quickstart vs. Advocacy Impact here.
Countable's platform empowers people to have their voices heard - be it by their lawmakers or a specific target recipients, committees or even CEOs. With our native messaging functionality, users have multiple options to get their message across: video, email messaging, phone and social media.
Our platform excels at encouraging authentic and powerful messages, driving and differentiating your campaign, providing you with assets to get the word out, a means to amplify involvement and ultimately delivering authentic and compelling messages directly to your targets. And by providing multiple options for users to communicate, we ensure that everyone can participate in the process regardless of their preference or technical ability.
We use video all of the time in our day to day lives, shouldn’t your next advocacy campaign? Countable’s platform makes it simple for users to capture and share their own authentic voice and story as user generated videos. Whether it's for sending a message to their elected officials or simply sharing their stories in support of a specific issue, we make it very easy.
From a mobile phone or desktop advocates just click the “Record Video” button, launching the video capture flow and then start recording. This flow can be launched from anywhere, making it easy to find and use. The video capture process is simple and user-friendly, and includes instructions and best practices to help them create and send their videos.
Once recorded, videos are placed in a queue and must be approved by an admin before being published or viewed outside of the CMS by others.
As an added bonus, the video capture flow can be customized to match your brand, ensuring that it looks and feels like an integral part of your website or app.
Before you can use any of the Videos that you collect (in your marketing or social media for example), you first need permission from the user. We make this easy. During the video creation flow, the user can check a box to indicate their agreement to allow you to use the video. Once permission has been granted, all of the raw video files that you collect are yours to keep and use as the terms allow.
Lawmakers receive the videos through their preferred contact method via their Constituent Management System. The video is included as a link as part of a structured submission that includes the advocate’s information, the issue or subject, via a standalone web page where they can view the video and share it internally. The link opens to a webpage that is hosted on Countable’s platform on a secure, SSL, webpage.
After a user submits a video, the video appears in a video collection queue where you can review, categorize, publish and share all of your videos. Countable does not use or share any of the content or data you collect. By repurposing your videos as marketing or donation content, you can reach a wider audience and build momentum for your cause. You can also leverage these videos in follow-up stories, social posts, and marketing or advertising initiatives to further promote your message. Countable can also enable users to record videos that will be uploaded directly to your site. And with the ability to pre-approve videos before they go live on webpage and tag them by location, topic, and more, you’ll be in complete control of your content and able to easily organize and manage your messaging efforts.
Lawmakers receive the emails through their preferred contact method via their Constituent Management System. Our user-friendly and easy-to-navigate feature simplifies the process of communicating with lawmakers - making it easy for the advocate to quickly send a pre-written method or author their own. They can choose a pre-set message but also have the option to personalize the message or draft their own before submitting it to their lawmaker. Giving users the option to tailor the message to align with their perspective increases the chances of successful engagement.
Your users can customize their pre-set default messages. These default messages, of which there can be up to 15 per article page (this does not apply to Quickstart), will be drafted by you and added to the corresponding article page.
Yes. We are fully integrated and approved.
Countable’s lawmaker messaging tool provides users with the main phone number of their representative's office. On a mobile device, it’s as simple as one click. Calls through a mobile device are tracked and reported on in our integrated reports.
Users simply dial and voice their opinions, concerns, or support directly.
The platform enables users to seamlessly connect with their elected officials on all levels of government, including federal, state, and local representatives, as well as governors and other key figures in local municipalities. But Countable’s capabilities don’t stop there - you can also reach out to committees, departments, and even CEOs, making it effortless to connect with anyone who has a digital presence.
In Advocacy Quickstart advocates can take a single phone call, email, or video message. They can restart the process as many times as they like. They can also share the campaign via social media.
In Advocacy Impact our platform allows you to create multiple actions, giving your supporters the ability to make their voice heard through a variety of means. You can use our tools to create targeted campaigns, send tailored messages to specific lawmakers, or to call for general actions. The flexibility of our tools allows them to be adapted to the specific goals of any organization, and enables the organization to amplify their advocacy efforts and make a stronger impact.
Our platform is designed to make it easy for you to connect your audience to your advocacy targets through email, phone, video, and social media. Whether you’re trying to pass legislation, raise awareness about an issue, or mobilize support for a cause, our platform has the tools you need to rapidly create and launch highly effective campaigns. Our user-friendly interface allows you to access all the necessary resources in one place, making it easy to get your message across, amplify your grassroots campaign or cause, and inspire a wide audience.
Countable is committed to supporting advocacy efforts both domestically and internationally. While we currently only support federal lawmaker messaging for Canada, we are actively exploring options to expand our advocacy capabilities to other countries in the future.
Yes.
As part of every implementation, we set up each client with a full analytics dashboard. Your site administrator has access 24x7.
Countable’s software is designed to work seamlessly with other tools and platforms, making it a powerful addition to any organization’s advocacy outreach. One of our key strengths is our seamless integration capabilities with various platforms and tools. We have specifically focused on developing integrations with Zapier and Stripe, as well as supporting integrations with popular CRM systems such as NGPVan and Blackbaud, which are widely used by advocacy groups and political campaigns to manage their contacts, track their outreach, and measure their impact.
For Advocacy Quickstart you can be up within an hour. We'll schedule a call to learn more about your campaign and goals and can have a platform up by the end of the call.
For Advocacy Impact a typical full implementation takes between 4 and 6 weeks from the time Countable receives design approvals. We always move as quickly as possible, and since white glove service is core to our company’s culture, we are always open to discussing what an expedited development timeline entails if helpful for your implementation.
Your primary responsibility will be to provide Countable with a preferred subdomain name for your impact hub (e.g. resources.yourbrand.com), introduction to your DNS manager, and your existing style guide (especially hex codes, typeface, hero images, logos, etc.). After that, we need you to approve mock ups and beta sites before we launch.
For prompt help, we have established an email for direct communication with our dedicated operations team. This team serves to supplement the support offered by your designated client representative.
For more resources about community engagement, check out our blog for articles like "6 Rules of Community Engagement" and more.
Gamification is only available on Advocacy Impact.
We use a variety of gamification features to encourage users to visit the platform regularly, take action, and continue to participate in order to deepen their engagement. Some examples of these gamification features include earning points and badges, and displaying a leaderboard to showcase the participation of users in the community. These features are designed to create a sense of accomplishment and competition, which in turn leads to increased activity and user involvement on the platform.
We recommend starting small with a few pieces of seed content to show that your site has resources available. Then build from there. The frequency of posting new content is up to you, but for campaigns it’s best to focus on promotions and resources related to the campaign. Additionally, it can be helpful to send email notifications to users about new content which can be adjusted for daily or weekly notifications.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is slated to have a profound effect on grassroots advocacy, communication, and democracy at large. As AI technologies like ChatGPT become more advanced, they pose significant threats to the integrity of constituent-to-lawmaker communication, ultimately affecting polling, voting, and democratic processes. Campaigns could potentially use generative AI to manipulate public sentiment by authoring and sending messages on behalf of individuals. Although legitimate campaigns wouldn't do this, third-party contractors and the tools they use might. And an onslaught of AI-generated messages could lead lawmakers and their staff to view constituent communication as less valid or valuable, ultimately undermining democracy.
This is only one aspect of the potential risks posed by AI. For more information and resources visit our AI action center here.
Countable offers multiple steps to ensure user identity and authenticity, including requiring users to provide their name, address, and email address when creating an account. Users must create an account and provide their prefix, name, address, and email address before being able to contact their lawmakers. Additionally, Countable uses reCAPTCHA, a widely-used security measure that helps to prevent spam and abuse on the platform by verifying that the user is a human and not a bot.