Signature Delivery¶

Communicating With Congress¶

For pages targeting the US House of Representatives and US Senate, we offer an integration with Communicating With Congress (CWC and SCWC), a House and Senate-approved delivery system that most representatives and some senators accept. Representatives and Senators don't need to open an email or download a CSV.

This method ensures delivery for participating representatives but you may get fewer signers as a result of the additional required fields. If you plan to deliver the signatures in person or if your petition is primarily for list growth, you may want to use a delivery method that requires less information from the signer.

To use CWC, a super user must first complete the Name and About Text for your organization. These are available on the CONFIG screen, reached by going to the gear menu > Configure ActionKit > Communicating With Congress.

Then you can use CWC with any Petition or Letter page targeting the House. Check the Communicating with Congress option on the Delivery screen.

This exposes a few required fields for the delivery:

Campaign Subject: Subject line included with each message.

Library of Congress Topic: Pick the most appropriate topic related to your campaign.

Campaign Statement: Included in the delivery as the "Organization Statement".

For Petition Pages, we will prefill this using the Petition Text you entered on the Edit Content screen for the Page. You can edit the text shown but you must include something. Snippets are not rendered for CWC delivery so if you have any in the Petition Text you should edit the Campaign Statement to remove them.

For Letters, you must enter a Statement.

The message received by the House member includes:

• the constituents prefix, name, address, and email,
• the Organization Name and About Text
• the Organization Statement
• optionally, any comment provided by the constituent

The About Text, Statement and comments are each cut off at 10,000 characters.

Enabling Communicating With Congress on a page that has already collected signatures will retroactively deliver those for any users that have all of the required fields on record.

Fax Targets¶

We offer fax delivery if you have an account with Interfax. After you've created an account, enter your Interfax login details on this configuration screen. The fax delivery option only shows once you have entered your account information.

Email Targets¶

Check the Email Targets box to display a drop down with the three email delivery options.

The choices are the same whether or not they work with the advocacy targets you've selected for your page, or if you haven't selected any targets. Be sure you are selecting an option that is available for your target types.

Choose from:

Immediate only: Sends a message immediately after a user signs. DOES NOT WORK FOR FEDERAL LEGISLATORS. This option can be used for state legislators, if they have an email address in our database, or custom targets, if you have entered an email address for them. When you get 30 signatures to any of the page's targets in one day, immediate delivery ends permanently for all targets. No further signatures are delivered for the page. It is possible to override this -- read more below.

Batch only: An email from your organization is sent to the target once each day when you have more signatures than a minimum threshold you select.

Batch delivery is available for federal legislators using a database of legislative staff (see Delivery to Federal Legislators data as well as for any target with an email address in our database.

Immediate then batch (recommended for state legislators and custom targets): Immediate delivery works as described above until you reach 30 signatures in one day. Then immediate delivery ends forever for all targets and daily delivery of your batch email begins. FEDERAL LEGISLATORS ONLY RECEIVE BATCH DELIVERY; there is no immediate delivery first.

from: Joe Smith <bounce@[yourdomain].org>
reply-to: Joe Smith <joe.smith@gmail.com>

Dear {{ target.title_full }},

I just signed a petition saying:

"REPLACEME: {{ form.statement_text|safe }}"

{% if action.custom_fields.comment %}
{{ action.custom_fields.comment }}
{% endif %}

{{ user.name }} {{ user.city }}, {{ user.state }}

Multiple User Actions¶

Signatures are not de-duped for delivery, whether batch, immediate, through Communicating With Congress or in bulk. If someone signs twice on a page that allows multiple signatures, a message is sent each time they sign with immediate delivery and with Communicating with Congress, and both signatures are included in a batch delivery.

What Happens If You Change Your Page's Targets?¶

If you change the targets associated with a page, previous signatures will not be delivered to the new targets by fax or immediate delivery but they will be included if you enable batch delivery.

For Communicating With Congress deliveries, signatures will be delivered retroactively for any users with all of the required fields of prefix, full name, and full address.