The POPVOX Blog

Articles Tagged POPVOX-Organization-Directory

About POPVOX's Organization Directory

by rachna on February 28, 2012

POPVOX, the award-winning online advocacy platform, today announced that its Organization Directory -- a robust resource designed to help Congressional staff find advocacy organizations, trade associations and community groups -- has topped 1,500 profiles.

The POPVOX Organization Directory, which is free and open to the public, lists each organization's mission, legislative agenda, contact information, and Facebook and Twitter pages. Position statements supporting or opposing specific legislation are displayed where available. For Congressional staffers logged into POPVOX, additional information such as contact emails and phone numbers are listed.

"The POPVOX Organization Directory was created with Congressional staffers, advocacy professionals and members of the media in mind," said POPVOX co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Rachna Choudhry. "Congressional staff looking for experts use the POPVOX Directory to identify niche organizations or groups beyond the 'usual suspects'. Issue organizations are using the directory to build coalitions around advocacy campaigns and to ensure organizational diversity within their efforts."

Any U.S.-based nonprofit organization, trade association, political action committee or community group can create a profile at http://www.popvox.com/organization. Organizations are individually researched and approved by the POPVOX team to maintain the integrity of the directory.

About POPVOX

POPVOX is a neutral, nonpartisan advocacy platform that meshes legislative data with individuals’ personal stories and sentiment. POPVOX delivers public input to Congress in a format tailored to actionable policy decisions and empowers users to leverage their expertise and numbers. For more information, visit: http://www.popvox.com

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Entrepreneur Magazine--They've Got Your Backers

by annalee on September 1, 2011

They've Got Your Backers in Entrepreneur Magazine
Hey, Issue Groups - Congress is looking for YOU on POPVOX!

by marci on June 13, 2011

If your organization takes positions on bills, Congressional staffers are looking for you on POPVOX!

Staffers WANT to know your organization's position on bills. It helps them do their jobs. Increasingly, Congressional staff are turning to POPVOX to find out where organizations stand on pending bills. POPVOX provides a platform for any nonprofit organization, trade association or community group to create a profile, maintain a legislative agenda of priorities, and register positions on bills so that Congressional staff can easily find it -- whether they want to pull a quote, find a witness for a hearing, or contact you for more information. How do we know? Search results. Those searches that lead staffers to POPVOX are overwhelmingly bill titles or nicknames (87%) increasingly with words like "oppose" "supporters of" "organizations opposing" or "letters in support" (12%). The rest are looking for information about POPVOX (9%) or our " Hill 101 " blog series (4%). These search keywords show up in Google Analytics reports, not tied to any personally identifiable information. We know they come from staffers because the service provider is identified as either "U.S. House of Representatives" or "United States Senate". Are we surprised? Not at all. POPVOX was designed to give staffers the information they need. Staffers are looking for quotes, perspectives, explanations and rationales so that they can make a well-reasoned recommendation to their boss. I know, I was that staffer! Where else can they find this information? It's tougher than you might think. They may eventually Google their way to the legislative page of your website, BUT, if affecting policy is your priority, why would you make them work so hard to find out where you stand? POPVOX is designed to get your message to Congress the way Congress needs to receive it. Read more about posting your organization's position on POPVOX . And get started! Don't miss an opportunity to put your message in front of key players in the legislative process... especially when they are searching for it!
New feature: Organizations can upload position statements

by rachna on February 17, 2011

I'm excited to share with you our newest feature on POPVOX! Organizations can now upload documents to their POPVOX profile page.

As we demo'ed and tested POPVOX with Congressional staffers, one of their most common comments was that they wished they had a centralized location for organizations to upload their issue-related documents. That way, when a staffer is looking for organizations that are supporting a specific bill, she would be able to access an organization's position statements, press releases and reports in a single mouse-click.

As one senior House committee staffer explained:

Given the fast pace on the Hill and the volumes of email staffers receive every day, it can be very hard to find quickly a given organizationʼs position on a matter. Searching websites can take time, emails get buried or deleted. I would love to see a central repository of letters written by outside groups on a given bill or issue; that is, one location where I knew I could easily see who has weighed in—both for and against. Not only would such a feature save me substantial time in finding a groupʼs position, but I could see the views of others that I might not have thought to look for, but whose input would be valuable to me.

How Organizations Can Upload Their Position Documents

Organizations can easily upload their documents on POPVOX directly from their profile page. From there, scroll down to your organization's "legislative agenda" and click on the option that says "Upload Document" (next to the icon with the document and up-arrow).

Next, you will be given the option to upload a press release, report, letter of support, coalition letter or any other document. Click on what you'd like to upload and then complete the boxes, beginning with the "document title."

Then, cut and paste the document text into the next box. Providing the document's text directly, rather than relying only on a PDF attachment is strategic: it means one less click for Congressional staffers to access your information. (And we all know that sometimes PDFs can take a while to download!) In addition, if your document is already up on your organization's website, you can also provide a link to it in the third box.

And lastly, hit "upload" -- and you're all set. You may upload one document of each type (press release, report, letter, etc) for each bill for which your organization has a position.

And after you upload, don't forget to repeat the other bills on your legislative agenda.

As always, we'd love your feedback on this new feature. Please let me know if you found this process simple or challenging, and how we can make POPVOX even more useful for your organization.