Case Studies

The Cicero API currently provides legislative district boundaries and elected official information to public and private web applications for newspapers, election watchdog groups, philanthropic foundations, unions, arts organizations, and private commercial firms. It can be seamlessly integrated with internal or public interfaces. Here are some examples of how your organization can use the Cicero API.

Website District Matching and Elected Official Lookups

Common Cause PA - Our Philadelphia
Through their Our Philadelphia website, Common Cause provides citizens of Philadelphia web-based district matching and elected official lookups in order to inform the public about campaign contributions to Pennsylvania candidates and elected officials. The Cicero API seamlessly feeds data into the embedded app available through the site.

Visitors to the site are able to:

• Find elected officials and learn where their top campaign contributions originated
• Learn more about election reform advocacy, including redistricting, campaign finance and ethics
• Read in-depth reports about the campaign contributions behind local issues that matter to Philadelphians

"Call-To-Action" Email Campaigns

Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance
The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance is Philadelphia’s premiere arts advocacy organization. As part of their advocacy activities, GPCA sometimes encourages its members and the general public to contact their legislators during call-to-action campaigns. They use the Cicero API’s data within their internal advocacy constituent relationship management system (eCRM) to match members to their elected officials, including their local City Council member. 

After GPCA members create an account and log into the GPCA website, they can view call-to-action e-mail campaigns that have been populated with the appropriate contact information for their City Council members or other elected officials. Should they choose to participate in the campaign, GPCA members can contact their legislators by just sending the e-mail through the GPCA system. 

Segmentation for Reporting and Analysis

The Pew Charitable Trusts - Cultural Data Project
Managed by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Cultural Data Project (CDP) is an online management tool that provides arts and cultural organizations nation-wide with data on the industry. The data gathered in the system enables participating organizations to track trends and benchmark their progress thanks to reporting tools. It also enables advocacy groups to make the case for arts and culture and funders to evaluate grantmaking activities more efficiently. 

The Cicero API is integrated in the Cultural Data Project internally to correctly match legislative districts with participating arts and culture organizations. After an organization enters its address in the online CDP forms, the Cicero API uses the address to identify the legislative districts associated with that location. Cicero then populates the legislative district fields in the forms for that organization, ensuring that both the arts institution and the Cultural Data Project have accurate legislative information.

Hyper-Local News Targeting

The Oregonian - Live Oregon Election Results
Serving the Portland, Oregon region, The Oregonian newspaper has been offering their online readers more innovative ways to access the news that affects them. On November 4, 2008, the day of the 2008 national elections, The Oregonian used the Cicero API to provide their readers with the ability to match their address to live tallies of votes for key political races in the legislative districts in which their address was located, in order to get more focused, local, and geographically relevant election results. They continue using the Cicero API to filter news for a reader based on that reader's address.

Political and Elections Boundary Analysis

ProPublica - How Powerful Interests Are Drawing You Out of a Vote
As an independent, non-profit investigative journalism organization, ProPublica works on stories that shine a light on important issues to the public interest. Redistricting is arguably one of the most secretive, corruptible and contentious issues yet it is so important to the foundation of our democracy. What better process to shine a light on? Using the resources we’d already been tracking in preparation for updating our Cicero API district maps, our team of GIS analysts quickly generated maps of proposed congressional districts for analysis as part of their investigative series “Redistricting: How Powerful Interests Are Drawing You Out of a Vote”.