Quick show of hands: how many of you know for certain which state senate district you live in? The identity of your state representative? The geographic boundaries of your elected officials’ districts or the last time they were redrawn?
For many organizations, this type of information is both invaluable and difficult to get with any degree of reliability. Knowing the geographic boundaries of the districts in which their members live can help to encourage them to express their opinions to the elected officials who represent them. Further, knowing the exact geographic boundaries of their members’ districts can help organizations more directly in their own advocacy roles. Imagine you work for a local non-profit and are scheduled to meet with a group of state representatives from your area. How would you like to be able to tell each of them just how many of the citizens they represent are supporters of your organization? How would you like to be able to tell those members that you spoke directly with their representative?
Cicero is designed to help. It is a web API (Application Programming Interface) that enables users to add legislator and legislative geography lookup capabilities -matching any address with their designated legislative districts and elected officials, including their geographic boundaries- to any website or software application. It is a cost-effective and precise way for organizations to receive legislative information, including contact information for their local (check our list of available local cities), state and federal level representatives, district maps, and school district identification.
If you’re not convinced … We just released a Cicero API 30-day free trial, now giving developers the opportunity to ‘test drive’ the API with their company or organization’s website or software – for free! Each 30-day free trial includes access to one region of your choice and up to 250 web service hits. Visitors to the Cicero site can also experience Cicero first-hand by visiting ‘Cicero Live‘ to get the information about elected officials who represent any address in the U.S.
In October we announced the release of several new, comprehensive sets of data including city council districts for more than 60 cities, and district lookup and legislator contact data for all U.S. state and federal legislative districts. We are thrilled to announce the addition of legislative and legislative geographic boundaries lookups for local, provincial and federal level data for the majority of the lower provinces in Canada (available soon on Cicero Live) – go Canucks!
Coming soon: Australia, New Zealand and France. Visit the Cicero website for more information, as well as an updated list of available data.
