When reaching out to elected officials, you want to make sure the right constituents are sending your message to the right recipients. Allowing a supporter from Texas to contact a legislator from Connecticut will be confusing at best and undermine your advocacy efforts at worst.

Geo-gating is a new feature within the Contact Your Lawmakers action that lets you control who can send messages to specific elected officials, ensuring every email, call, or social media post comes from an actual constituent. This empowers your community to perform grassroots or large-scale advocacy with precision.

How it works and why it matters

When creating a Contact Your Lawmakers action, you can now select certain states, provinces, or districts within your country of choice. When the supporter interacts, they will enter their address like normal, and if they fall within the area you designated when creating your button, they are permitted to call or email their corresponding elected official. Supporters outside the eligible area will see a message explaining they can’t take action.

Geo-gating ensures you're only reaching the lawmakers you intend to, helping you preserve a strong reputation with the people you're trying to influence. It also helps you maximize supporters' impact by ensuring their messages only reach elected officials who directly represent them, keeping outreach focused and strategic.

Campaigns utilizing geo-gating compensate for potentially lower message volume by ensuring supporters are local to their district. When elected officials know the message is coming from their district, they’re much more likely to listen.

Below is a live example button, geo-gated to only federal U.S. senators and representatives in California. If you'd like to see what each flow would look like, try inputting the following addresses:

• 750 W 7th St Suite 201, Los Angeles, CA 90017, USA (within the selected area)
• Bennelong Point, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia (outside the selected area)

Let’s look at some use case examples to showcase when this feature might be useful.

Use cases

• A local housing group in California has one state senator representing their district. They only want constituents of that senator to be able to reach out, so they geo-gate their Contact Your Lawmakers action to only supporters who live in that district.
• A commercial fishing bill is moving through the U.S. Congress that greatly affects states on the East Coast. An environmental protection nonprofit wants to focus their efforts on these states, so they set up the Contact Your Lawmakers action to only target senators and representatives from those states.
  
• A Welsh advocacy organization pushing for independent schools has had people from other countries in the UK contact their elected officials. They create a Contact Your Lawmakers action limiting participants to citizens of Wales only, ensuring their advocacy isn’t diluted by other interests.
• A group trying to improve low-income housing in Liverpool only wants residents to weigh in to their MPs, as well as a few surrounding towns to add weight to their argument, so they restrict the ActionButton to just the constituencies of the area.
  

• New tax laws affect all but one Australian territory, so an advocacy not-for-profit for working families limits participation to those areas.

As you can see, geo-gating can greatly improve the focus of an advocacy campaign, ensuring the right message reaches the right elected officials. With this feature, you’re not just contacting lawmakers—you’re mobilizing the people they were elected to serve.

Overall, this increases your organization’s legitimacy, heightens impact, and lets you target the right people with laser focus. Give geo-gating a try and make your next Contact Your Lawmakers campaign the most effective one yet.

This feature is only available on our paid plan. Visit our pricing page for more information on our plans.