Note: This article was written before we developed the Connect module to help us develop more robust take action campaigns. We have now integrated this with a postal code to riding service that we are offering and have started to provide a take action web service as well. For more information contact us

OpenConcept has been involved in developing take action tools for progressive organization since the Summit of the Americas protest in Quebec City in 2001. We worked on petition tools used by rabble.ca to release Jaggi Singh, by COAT to oppose the post 911 invasion of Afghanistan. We developed this as an open source petition script and licensed it under the GPL. Furthermore we implemented letter writing functionality into our old CMS, Back-End. We were also somewhat involved in supporting the development of a PostNuke petition module. MySociety.org has some petition scripts available here.

Since moving to Drupal we've migrated the main take action tool to Drupal (Lobby module). The timing wasn't right for us to work with the folks at Citizen Speak with their module. Echo Ditto organized an interesting one under an open source license, but it wasn't largely adopted by the larger community echopetition, We developed our Lobby module to work with CiviCRM, but the API was still pretty green when we started this work. Since the API stabilized there has been at least one petition module released that works with it - Petition.

There isn't at this stage a clear or easy choice to allow you to implement action tools on your site. What we can gather from this rather long history is that developing online action tools is difficult and that a single developer or campaign isn't going to build something that is robust enough for the community's needs. An increasing number of campaigns sites are being run with Drupal, but there isn't a single module which is ready to play a central role in the communities advocacy needs.

The new signit module that is being developed for DefectiveByDesign campaign and is sponsored by CivicActions is a refreshing, new attempt to build some decent action tools into Drupal. It is still being developed, but it promises be the missing module. It would be flexible enough to work either with the power of a CRM, but could also be used without it for smaller sites. It is being developed so that it could be either a petition or a send-email-to-politician type of tool.

I'm looking forward to seeing this module develops and how OpenConcept can help it mature into a versatile, multi-lingual campaign tool. Certainly in Canada having a bilingual campaign tool would be critical for any national campaign.