Introduction
DemocraCRM is an open source, purpose-built public affairs and advocacy platform designed for supporting grassroot efforts to pass pro-democracy, anti-corruption laws everywhere, for everyone.
The Purpose
It's main goal is to advance reform efforts through organizing and lobbying for legislative changes. The organizing functionality centers around recruiting, engaging, and activating people in specific reform campaign activities, and the lobbying functionality centers around targeting officials and voters, performing advocacy efforts, and tracking progress on proposed legislation that meets the campaign objectives.
DemocraCRM differs from other common activism CRMs such as NationBuilder and Action Network because it focuses specifically on practices and processes dedicated to getting legislation passed. While these other services provide excellent value for many groups, we needed a specific set of tools to do our jobs as effectively as possible and could quickly evolve with our needs.
The Platform
Many additional features are being developed to support these efforts by making the platform a collaborative place for organizations to share information and work together towards common legislative goals. Each organization will have a workspace account where its activities are performed within, and platform users can join workspaces and participate in those organizations' efforts. This is similar to Slack, for example.
Organizations can share and collaborate on data and content together, such as on a piece legislation that is mutually beneficial to each's reform goals. They will also benefit from centralized data and services that the platform provides, freeing them up to focus on what they do best.
The People
DemocraCRM is currently being developed by a team within March on Harrisburg, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit with a mission to "Make Corruption Illegal and Take our Democracy to Where It’s Never Been." Our hope is to recruit allied organizations to help build this platform into something that empowers everyone working towards that same goal, in every state in the US and possibly beyond.
If you're interested, please reach out via connect@democrobot.ai or on the GitHub project page.