Okay–indulge me as a proud mother (and #nevertrumper) engages in some shameless promotion….

As many of you will remember from a previous post, one of my sons is a web developer, and following the 2016 election, created the Activism Engine website. That site is being used, but not to the extent he’d hoped, because a site like AE depends in large part on a massive amount of content that is timely and meaningful, which in turn relies on a virtual army of content producers to fulfill the vision of the site and make it as useful as it can be.

It was foreseeable that building such a content network (consisting of 12 issue categories in 3 approach areas spread across 50 states) was never going to be quick or easy. In the meantime, as my son put it, he “wanted to take what I thought was most interesting about the site, and package it in a way that could be immediately useful to potential activists and people who would like to get involved and make the world a better place.”

He is his mother’s child….

Anyway, out of this desire was born a new app, Take Action (takeaction.me). It shares a user database with Activism Engine, so people who already have an account on AE can login directly to the takeaction.me app. But takeaction.me differs in that the content is created by the app users for their own use, although they are able to share actions with friends (a feature that should make it particularly useful to the new groups springing up in advance of the 2018 midterm elections, or just as a “buddy system” to help keep motivation high).

With the takeaction.me app, users can:

• Add, edit, and review actions in any of a variety of categories
• Share those actions with friends, and copy or follow friend’s actions
•  See charts and graphs and tables to help make sense of the actions they are taking
• See a list (based on address or just a zip code) of all their representatives, and be able to call or email them directly from the app (and have those calls or emails added automatically to their actions list) This is my personal favorite feature! It makes it unbelievably simple to contact everyone from your City-County Counselor to the President.
• Search for and connect with friends, see and share their issues and actions, and decide what to share with them.
• last, but not least, there is an option when adding an action to also submit it for review to Activism Engine. The hope is that takeaction.me and activismengine.org will provide each other with motivation and content, so he has made it easy to share activity between the two.

The app is available at the iTunes Store and an Android version is available at Google Play.
Trust me — it’s worth the 99 cents! (But only if you USE it!)