Best Advocacy Software for Nonprofits and Political Causes (2022)

Advocacy software is a must for any nonprofit or political cause looking to make an impact.

These tools can help you organize and mobilize your supporters, and give them the tools they need to make their voices heard.

In this blog post, we will take a look at the best advocacy software programs available in 2022.

Whether you are just starting out or you are looking for an upgrade, we have something for you!

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What is the best advocacy software?

The best advocacy software tools are easy to use, empower your movement to take action, and are also affordable.

My top picks are OneClick Politics, NationBuilder, and GravityForms.

OneClick Politics

Best advocacy software for emailing elected officials.

OneClick Politics is a great advocacy software for nonprofit organizations and political advocacy organizations. It is easy to use and has a lot of features that can help you organize and mobilize your supporters. OneClick Politics also offers a free trial, so you can try it out before you commit to anything.

Features:

• Email campaigns – make it easy for your supporters to email their elected officials and lobby for change. Email state/provincial or federal elected officials in either the USA, Canada or Australia. You can also build your own custom list of recipients if you’re lobbying figures from outside of government.
• Online petitions – collect signatures and build your movement
• Built-in message rotator – randomly selects pre-filled emails and subject lines so your supporters don’t have to start their advocacy email from scratch.
• Great integrations – integrations available for some of the most popular CRMs used in grassroots advocacy including:
  • Salesforce
  • NationBuilder
  • iMIS
  • Neon CRM
  • Kindful
• Built-in email marketing – OneClick Politics has Campaign Monitor (one of the best email service providers) built-in.

Price:

You’ll need to contact OneClick Politics for a quote. Pricing will vary depending on the size of your campaign, and how long you expect your campaign to last.

My take:

If you need to rally people to email their elected representatives in either the USA, Canada or Australia, then OneClick Politics is a great option. OneClick Politics also takes the headache out of having to maintain your own database of elected officials and their contact details.

NationBuilder

NationBuilder is a powerful all-in-one solution that can power the smallest through to the very largest political campaigns.

It has been used in local grassroots campaigns, all the way through to running US presidential campaigns.

If your campaign is looking for an all-in-one solution for your advocacy software, then you should definitely consider checking out NationBuilder.

Features:

• Online petitions – use the super simple petition builder to get your advocacy campaign up and running in minutes.
• Supporter database – NationBuilder provides powerful database tools to help fuel your advocacy campaign and mobilise your supporters and volunteers. Its even capable of housing the voter file for your district, state or country. So NationBuilder makes for a great constituent engagement solution for congressional campaigns.
• Polls and surveys – get feedback from your supporters on the issues that matter to them
• Donation processing – take donations online and manage all of your finances in one place with NationBuilder’s built-in online donation tools.
• Scalable donor management system – keep track of your donors and assign relationships to different members of your team.
• Events, calendars and RSVPs – organise your advocacy events with NationBuilder’s built-in event management system. With NationBuilder you can set up event registration pages in just a couple of minutes allowing your volunteers and supporters to let you know when they’ll be showing up to your next advocacy event.
• Integrations – use the included Zapier integration to connect NationBuilder to the most popular apps.

Price:

NationBuilder offers three main pricing tiers:

• Starter – starting at $29/mo
• Pro – starting at $139 /mo
• Enterprise – a bespoke package for larger campaigns

My take:

If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution for your advocacy campaigns, then NationBuilder is a great option.

There are real benefits to having all your advocacy tools in one place.

Your grassroots campaign will benefit from having your outreach tools all in one place.

And the built-in mobile friendly website templates make NationBuilder’s advocacy platform, online fundraising, easy for your supporters to take action.

Gravity Forms

The best solution for websites built on WordPress.

Is your nonprofit’s website built on WordPress?

Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create forms on your WordPress website.

WordPress is one of the most common website builders.

Adding Gravity Forms to your WordPress site allows you to create and build forms that visitors to your website can fill out.

Features:

• Easy to use form builder – use Gravity Forms to easily build an online petition that your website visitors can sign.
• Notification Emails – every time someone fills in your petition, you could have Gravity Forms notify the petition target (eg. a particular member of Congress, or CEO of a company you are lobbying.)
• Works on WordPress – the largest website building platform in the world.
• Integrations are available for many popular apps including MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Salesforce, and 100s of other apps through the available Zapier connection.
• Free version available and the basic plan is only $59 / year.

Price:

My take:

If your website is built on WordPress and you need to run an online petition campaign, then you should definitely consider using WordPress.

Gravity Forms is one of the most widely used form builder plugins for WordPress and very easy to use.

Change.org

Best advocacy software for one-off petitions and maximum signatures.

I’ll be honest, there are very few times that I would ever recommend change.org as a nonprofit advocacy software solution.

But it does have its uses so let’s discuss those.

But first, we have to consider its number one drawback.

Several years ago, they removed the ability for petition organizers to export the name and email addresses of people who signed their petition.

This means that change.org is great for getting a lot of signatures on a petition – and fast.

But it is terrible for building an ongoing movement.

If you need to be able to email and communicate your campaign’s supporters, then you should consider an alternative to change.org.

Features:

• Well-established brand – many people have signed change.org petitions. That means more people are familiar with the system and trust it.
• Website optimized for action – change.org’s website is designed to make the most of every visitor and to drive them to take action.
• Progress bar – signature goals increase automatically as you get more signatures on your petition.

Price:

• Free to start a petition
• Option to ‘promote’ your petition through paid advertisements to change.org’s database of online advocates.

My take:

If you want to start an online petition for a one-off campaign and you don’t have a lot of resources, and you’re not looking to build a long-lasting movement, then change.org might be a good fit for you.

What is advocacy software?

There are plenty of options available for advocacy campaigns looking to give their supporters a voice.

Advocacy software is any app or platform that uses digital technology to empower advocacy efforts from organizations wanting to organize and take action.

The most popular advocacy solutions include features like:

• online advocacy forms like the ability to manage online petitions and email campaigns
• world class online fundraising tools like donation forms, donor and advocate profiles, and fundraising progress bars.

Conclusion

We’ve provided plenty of options for advocacy campaigns looking to find the right advocacy software to help turbocharger their community and government relations campaigns.

Which advocacy solution you choose will depend on your campaign’s goals and size.

Most campaigns though would benefit from a combination of either OneClick Politics and/or NationBuilder. They’re my top two recommendations for most people who want to run grassroots campaigns.