Resistbot - Text RESIST to 50409 to contact your officials

Do you suppose that calling it Resistbot limits your audience by 50%? Is this more of an app for political engagement where growth is your focus or more of a political statement to enable people to express their anti-Trumpness easily?

Resistbot was born out of my personal frustrations with trying to contact my members of Congress. I know it's important to do it every day, and there are dozens of blog posts and websites that tell you only a certain way "counts" - calls, emails, faxes, town halls, etc. My reps' phone lines are always jammed, and there's only someone there during the day. So most days, I don't actually get around to connecting to a person, let alone all three for my 2 Senators and 1 House rep. So I started trying to email each day. But Congress has accomplished the amazing feat of making it hard to email them. It's actually easier (!) to fax. So I started faxing every day. And I wanted to make sure my faxes were getting through, so I started learning about how Congressional offices handle messages. It turns out that most of them use software to help them categorize the inbound messages they get, sort them into issue buckets, and tally up the for/against numbers. Faxes and emails get automatically scanned and dumped into that flow - as long as they are not form letters and are verifiably from a constituent. So I designed Resistbot to solve this problem for me. It makes it insanely easy to generate a fax to each of my representatives every day. It doesn't tell me what to say (remember, form letters don't count) but makes my short text into a nice-looking letter. Now, i have my voice heard daily. Over time, Resistbot asks more questions and gets more sophisticated about what it's sending. If people find this useful, we'll eventually add more channels of contact, like phone emails and town halls. Our goal is to make it super simple to get started, and then have people level-up to more advanced features down the road. I hope you'll find it helpful as you look for ways to resist. Eric PS. Some extra commands: 'more' 'less' 'daily' 'weekly' 'monthly' 'reset' 'feedback' 'meme' 'tip' PPS. Mad props to the RapidPro open source community and Twilio.org who made this possible

Resistbot is crazy easy to use and I get a major kick out of the fact that it makes it communicating with your senators as easy as texting and then it sends them a fax (so they're gonna see it!). Also, the bot is super friendly— I had to catch myself at the end from exchanging pleasantries!

I'm intrigued by invisible apps, especially SMS-based bots, because they're so easy to start using. Something like this is especially useful in big group or event settings where the time/energy to download an app from the App Store might be too distracting.

This is pretty amazing. Super simple. Not sure I love the name Resist (as some others have said) but the concept is fantastic and I'd like to think would drive some new civic engagement. I could see this tool paired with data collected from our new mobile feedback tool - Swurveys - as an amazing partnership. First someone who had an issue that they deeply cared about could build and send out a Swurvey to their fellow like-minded constituents to get a critical mass of people who have the same opinion - i.e. 85% of people in your district agree that we need to oppose the Muslim Ban Executive Orders. Then they would push this through Resist with a link to the publicly viewable results. Nice work!

Hi Product Hunters, we're really happy to share this with you, and get your help testing this out! This project is the work of dozens of volunteer coders and designers who came together after the election around a vision of making it incredibly easy to contact your officials to lobby the current administration. Just text 'RESIST' to 50409 to get started, and please give us any and all feedback. This is the first of what will be many experiments to get people civically engaged, especially with their representatives in Congress, on a regular basis.

I'm a huge fan of tech that effectively matches simple actions to outcomes that work -- in this case, sending a text and transforming that text into a fax (which is more likely to be read by a rep's staffers than a tweet, email, etc.). In a time when trying to have a voice in politics often feels like shouting into a void, it's reassuring to see that fax image and know it's going to get in front of the right eyes. Bonus: the bot is cheerful and friendly, but not overly chatty. Straight to the point!

So impressed by the UX of this from start to finish. Seeing a screenshot of the fax sent was a powerful experience. The scale of output to effort is off the charts :) Great great work!

OMG! I'm in love. Thank you guys. Just sent notes to my Senators.