Call-Your-Rep & Citizen Action Tools

5 Calls, Resistbot, Phone2Action, Quorum — tools for contacting elected officials and running advocacy campaigns.

The "tap a button, call your senator" category split early into a free / FOSS volunteer side and a paid advocacy-tech side. Pair with Civic Tech Overview, Elections Data, Public Consultation, and Civic Organizations.

Free / non-profit (start here — for individuals)

★ ★ 5 Calls — free; non-profit; mobile-first; gives you the issue, the script, and the phone numbers for your senators / representative; tracks calls made. The default "I want to call my rep right now" tool. iOS + Android + web.
★ ★ Resistbot — free for senders; SMS-based — text RESIST to 50409 and the bot turns it into a fax / email / postal letter to your reps. Genuinely lowers the friction floor; non-profit; donation-funded.
★ Common Cause — non-profit; advocacy-action tools embedded in their campaigns; not a general-purpose tool.
★ Indivisible app + scripts — free; published call scripts and townhall finder; volunteer-organized.
Countable (now archived) — was the canonical "see-what-Congress-is-voting-on" app; sold to Causes; mostly inactive.
Civic Eagle / Enview — pivoted away from individual users.

Phone2Action (now part of Quorum) — paid; the dominant US advocacy-CRM SaaS; lets nonprofits / corporates / trade associations run "click to call your rep" campaigns at scale; Salesforce-shaped.
Quorum — paid; the top US legislative-tracking + advocacy-CRM platform; expensive (~$10k+/year minimum); used by lobbyists, trade associations, large nonprofits.
FiscalNote — paid; competitor to Quorum; legislative tracking + analytics.
NationBuilder — paid; political-campaign CRM with advocacy modules; common with smaller campaigns.
EveryAction / Bonterra — paid; nonprofit-CRM with advocacy bolts; very common in US progressive orgs.
Salsa Labs — paid; older nonprofit-CRM still in use.
Action Network — partially free for grassroots, paid plans; left-of-center nonprofit advocacy platform; used by MoveOn, Indivisible, etc.

★ OpenStates API — free; state legislators + bills; see Elections Data.
★ ProPublica Congress API — free for non-commercial; member data, votes, statements.
★ Congress.gov bulk data — free; bills, vote records.
★ GovTrack API — free; member statistics, ideology scores.
5 Calls API — free; their issue scripts.
Civic Information API (Google) — deprecated end-of-2024.

Change.org — free for petitioners, paid promoted-petition tier; petitions only; functionally limited as a pressure tool.
MoveOn Petitions — non-profit; free; left-of-center.
The Action Network — see above.
Causes — community-petition platform; underused now.

★ ★ WriteToThem (UK) — mySociety; free; AGPL FOSS; emails any UK politician at any level. The UK equivalent of 5 Calls. Long-running mySociety success.
★ TheyWorkForYou (UK) — mySociety; tracks every MP's votes and statements; built on Hansard. Free + FOSS.
Abgeordnetenwatch (Germany) — non-profit; lets you publicly question MPs; the answer is published.
Nosdéputés.fr (France) — non-profit; deputy-tracking.

For individuals: 5 Calls + Resistbot. Don't overthink it. Both are free and run by small non-profits.
For nonprofit advocacy at scale: there is no good FOSS option. Quorum / Phone2Action / Action Network split the market and are all proprietary. The closest FOSS alternative is Loomio + Action Network's partial-free tier or rolling your own with the OpenStates API + a Twilio account. The market is overdue for a FOSS challenger.
Phone calls beat emails beat petitions. This is well-evidenced congressional-staff folklore; build your tool to push toward calls.
WriteToThem is the model — mySociety has run it for 20+ years on minimal infrastructure and a small team. The US has no direct equivalent because the US Congressional contact-form ecosystem is intentionally fragmented.

Individual citizen, fastest path: 5 Calls (call) or Resistbot (text).
UK citizen: WriteToThem; track via TheyWorkForYou.
Building grassroots distribution lists: Action Network (free tier).
Nonprofit, mid-budget, you need a CRM: EveryAction or Action Network (paid).
Trade association / lobbying-shop: Quorum.
You're a developer building on US legislator data: OpenStates + ProPublica Congress API. See Elections Data.