As you scroll through our website you’ll see “causes” mentioned a number of times. Given that, soon, our actual landing page will be our cause explorer, a number of you might be wondering where causes come from. Great question! I’ll walk you through it.
A cause is created when our curation team uploads the title and description of a specific policy issue onto our platform. We attribute a place and a locality (federal, state or local) to each of our causes. That way it’s both easier to find and politicians do not accidentally add themselves to causes in a far away place where they have no influence. Our next step is to suggest causes to politicians based on our research about their policy stances. Politicians can also add themselves to causes that fall under their jurisdiction.
There are a lot of issues that people care about. Since donations go to candidates’ political campaigns, we seek to create only causes that can be influenced by elected officials. For example, as much as we would like to, we cannot create causes around Supreme Court decisions. Supreme Court justices are not elected officials and their positions are designed to be above political influence.
We already have a number of ideas about what the most contested issues are in the nation (At the time of this posting Immigration, Gun Control and Education are the top three researched issues of the 2016 Presidential race right now, according to Google Trends). In order to create causes that reflect those issues, we look into current legislation to see which jurisdictions have control over which issues. These help us both formulate our causes and come up with suggestions for which politicians to add to which causes. When writing up our causes, we seek to understand all the proposed solutions to a policy issue (Keep it the same! Change it to A! Change it to B!), and we create separate, opposing causes for candidates to choose from.
Congress.gov, as well as numerous state legislatures’ websites have comprehensive information about legislation proposed and enacted through their chambers. In cases where there is not enough data – where we are looking at smaller, local politics, or when legislation hasn’t been introduced yet – we look at news sources and petitions to determine which issues are gaining traction, and research statements made by officials, as well as current laws to see who has the power to change those issues. Newspapers will often predict politicians’ stances on an issue, or mention those already working on it. We suggest our related causes to candidates who have already taken their stand, and invite others to add themselves to whichever side they see fit.
This is part 1 of 4 in a series about causes. Later posts in our series will cover examples of how causes might work in action, more in depth information behind how politicians are added to causes, and the methodology behind who we invite to our causes. Feel free to post below if you have any questions!
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