You Can Pay Someone to Call Congress, but Should You?
Calling members of Congress is difficult , especially if you have a phone phobia, but it’s the most effective way to get your voice heard. The Civic Action Network is a non-partisan service that offers a solution: They’ll call Congress for you.
“Think of CAN as your own congressional state! You, the voter, can now easily and securely contact Congress, ”reads the description on the website .
You can purchase a monthly membership that gives you a certain number of calls to Congress. Membership also gives you access to their Citizen Bill survey emails, which give you account summary data three times a week. The rates are as follows:
6 calls at $ 4.99 per month
13 calls at $ 9.99 per month
21 calls for $ 14.99 a month.
The first five calls are free. You can respond to the bill by expressing your support or disagreement with it by email or by leaving a comment below the summary of the bill on the Civi website.
However, there are criticisms of the service, for example, that it is based on money and the privileges of those who can afford it.
“If you want rich people to have even more influence in our democracy, this is a great achievement. If not, it’s a terrible event that will make members even less responsive to their constituents because it makes the signals they receive even less expensive, ”said Lee Drutman, senior fellow at New America’s Political Reform Program.
I signed up for a free trial of Civi. It was easy and only took a few minutes. But things got more complicated when I had to figure out how to get Civi to call me. I finally realized that at the bottom of each invoice there was a form that asked my position and if I wanted to add a personal message.
It is only slightly easier than making a phone call, because you still have to make an effort to add information about why you support or oppose a particular bill. It sounded like an email.
As for the effectiveness of the call, I’m not sure. Did calling on my behalf make my message less effective? The best way to make sure your posts have an impact is to add personality. This is why coming to a city hall meeting is more efficient than a phone call, which is more effective than an email.
“Civi is another tool that is trying to make it easier for people to make calls, so people do it more often,” said Nick O’Neill, founder of 5 Calls . “Someone dials a phone number and speaks for you is a great way to reduce the effort and skip the dreaded step, but I’m not sure if that’s the best way to make an impact. It will be harder for someone else delivering this message on your behalf than for you. ”
The summary of the Civi bill was helpful, especially as it has sections on why you might want to support or oppose the bill. However, their search function didn’t work as well as I hoped. A search for “abortion” yielded nothing, and it seemed like it only found results when the search term was in the title of the bill.
Other tools to help you interact with Congress are 5 Calls and Daily Action , which provides you with contact information for members of Congress, briefs you on important issues, and helps you figure out what to say when you’re on the line.
Civi doesn’t make it that much easier to call members of Congress, so when my free trial expires, I think I’ll keep calling them myself.