Expand Contact Options for Effectiveness

[essandess]

Adding expanded options for contacting legislators would be an extremely useful application of this repo.

Sometimes you want to email just your representatives (as democracy.io provides).

Sometimes you want to phone or fax the district office of a member of a specific committee.

The importance of choosing the right channel is highlighted in this tweet:

Second, writing a letter to the district office (state) is better than sending an email or writing a letter to DC.

— Emily Ellsworth (@editoremilye) November 12, 2016

Full thread in the storify How to effectively talk to your member of congress.

There are command-line scripts for getting this information, like congress_lookup.py, e.g.:

congress_lookup.py --committee Finance fax
"Senate Committee on Finance" member properties:
Property 'fax' for Orrin G. Hatch:
202-224-6331
...

Wrapping this general capability in a nice streamlined API like democracy.io would allow for greater communication ease and effectiveness.