Check out The Aspen Institute's post "Goal Setting: How to Ensure Your Goal is SMART". In it, they lay out a plan for both achieving your advocacy goals and capacity building. Of course, they're both often interconnected. A well-executed advocacy campaign can enhance your networks and build your capacity for future campaigns, even if the current one doesn't achieve the desired outcome.

All goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and tangible. Read more here.

Today we made it official: We've dropped the "r" and we're now Grasshop. More on the name change at the end.

We've also officially launched our grassroots advocacy and communications platform, which some of you have been using and helping us improve. If that's you... Thanks!

We designed Grasshop to bring effective engagement tools to associations, member organizations and individual issue advocates. We're addressing three big challenges facing many grassroots organizations and activists: Advocacy technology is expensive, difficult to use, and it's not always very social.

Our goal with Grasshop is to make it simple for associations and activists to communicate with their supporters and get them engaged in advocacy campaigns. Grasshop focuses on two areas:

• Grassroots Advocacy. Launch and track issue-advocacy campaigns at the federal, state and local level in minutes. Use a mix of email and social media channels to get your calls-to-action to your supporters and their networks. We match everyone to their elected officials and get their messages delivered while you track your success.
• Stakeholder Communications. Use a mix of email and social media channels to reach all of your members and supporters and target your communications by state, city or district. Facilitate a social media community of your most passionate supporters and provide tools for them to share your content and campaigns.

The high cost of legacy advocacy technology has kept these tools out of the hands of most associations and grassroots organizations. We wanted to make a robust grassroots advocacy solution available to all organizations, regardless of budget or technical resources. Now, having authentic stakeholders who share your passion and positions on issues is the only ingredient necessary to wage an effective advocacy campaign and get your voices heard.

Susan Connors, President and CEO of the Brain Injury Association of America, says "with Grasshop, the process of communicating with our members and launching grassroots advocacy campaigns is much simpler. And the accessibly of Grasshop makes it easier for our state affiliates to get on board."

About the name change. When we first thought of "Grasshopr" we felt we had a great name and a clever "webby" spelling. Many agreed. However, since then, the owner of grasshopper.com transferred from a lawnmower company to a phone service for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Since then, brand confusion has increased, so we decided to drop the "r" from our name. It's shorter and seems to have ended confusion. Are we bitter? Nope! We actually love the Grasshopper.com phone service and use it ourselves! How's that for happy irony!

We'd like to thank The Brain Injury Association of America and the other organizations who have helped us get to this official launch. It's only the beginning, so stay tuned for more features and more enhancements! We've got a lot in store!

- Andrew Wright, Co-founder

The Sunlight Foundation (we're big fans of Sunlight here at Grasshopr) has been leading the charge to make our government more open and transparent. While there are many high-profile efforts in the area of government transparency, they recognize there's a difference between the concept of transparency and actual implementation of technologies and policies to make it so. 

The System’s Broken

In our democracy, a lot of attention gets paid to voting and elections. Sadly, not enough attention gets paid to what happens between elections – communications between constituents and their elected officials. This important aspect of our democracy is broken. Badly.

It’s broken because of the sheer volume of email Congress receives each year. The Congressional Management Foundation estimates they receive more than 350 million emails per year and staff sizes remain the same. They’re simply overwhelmed.

It’s broken because there’s a trust gap. Spam, astroturf and proxy email campaigns have eroded a sense of trust that real people are taking real action. Elected officials and their staff don’t know who’s real and who isn’t. Who intended to contact them and who didn’t. Who’s a constituent and who isn’t.

It’s broken because the tools for advocacy are only available to well-funded organizations. They have the resources to kick up so much dust that many other voices get lost in the shuffle. All interests are special, but some interests are more special than others when a few can wage massive email campaigns.

Elected officials want to hear from their constituents and build stronger relationships. Individuals want their voices heard, and of course organizations want their members concerns heard. The status quo works against these goals.

We Creating Grasshop to Address these Issues

We're creating Grasshop to give organizations, individuals, and elected officials an authentic, sustainable, and efficient means of engaging on issues at the federal, state, and local level. By "organization," I mean an officially-registered nationwide association or an informal small town grassroots community group. A non-profit or a company. A political party organization or a talk radio show audience. Wherever a group of people come together because of common interests, causes, or issue positions, Grasshop can help.

Organizations should have a platform for their members to communicate, collaborate, and engage in the public policy process. They should be able to know which legislative districts their members fall in and target their communications, event notifications, and advocacy alerts accordingly.  

Elected officials should know when those communicating with them are real people who took action themselves on their own accord. They should be able to manage the communications process efficiently so they can concentrate on the job their constituents sent them to office to do.

And organizations are more effective when they tap into their most valuable resource: People. Engaging individual members in conversation and collaboration is better than blasting one-way emails.

Everyone benefits when individuals are engaged and advocacy is authentic.

- Andrew, Jon, and Sujay