Sending emails through a nonprofit's website

April 12, 2009 9:47 AM

How to set up a way for my non-profit's supporters to send letters to the editor and to elected officials online?

I'm looking for a way to set up an online letter-writing campaign. Ideally, a supporter would be able to visit our website, select from a list of recipients, customize the body of the email, and hit send.

My non-profit group's website runs on Wordpress and Drupal, but I haven't been able to find a plug-in or module-based solution through either of those platforms. Is there a stand-alone solution or an easy way to implement this?

posted by acridrabbit to computers & internet (5 answers total)

This isn't answering the question, but be careful you aren't breaking any rules that would jeopardize your tax status.
posted by Pants! at 9:59 AM on April 12, 2009

Good point. The good thing is, non-profits are allowed to do a limited amount of "lobbying" - as determined by the amount of time and money that is spent - and in this case, we're not taking a stand on a specific piece of legislation.
posted by acridrabbit at 10:33 AM on April 12, 2009

Drupal 6 with triggers/actions could do this. Also look at workflows module
posted by BrodieShadeTree at 11:12 AM on April 12, 2009

This is specifically what CapWiz does. I don't know what their rates are, but if you have a budget, it might be worth investigating. Looks like you request a proposal from them by detailing what you need to an account person. We used this at my old nonprofit but it was a really big organization with plenty of money for stuff like this. I've seen lots of other nonprofits using it, though, so maybe they have affordable packages. If you roll your own, you might get some tips on how to do it by reading about how CapWiz does it.
posted by Askr at 1:15 PM on April 12, 2009

Just to follow up on what Askr said, this is what we did for the Epilepsy Foundation with Capwiz: capwiz / efa.
posted by ph00dz at 9:35 AM on April 13, 2009