The Top 10 Advocacy Software Platforms for Nonprofits

Advocacy campaigns allow nonprofits to tackle their target issues by campaigning for change at the local, state, or even national level. Of course, planning and executing these campaigns can be complex, and nonprofits will need to balance advocacy campaigns with their other program and fundraising responsibilities. 

Fortunately, advocacy software for nonprofits is designed to streamline campaign planning, simplify volunteer management, and facilitate key advocacy tasks. To help your nonprofit find the right advocacy software, we’ll provide a buyer’s checklist of top advocacy features before sharing our top recommended providers. 

Nonprofit Advocacy Software Checklist

1. Springboard by Jackson River: Best Comprehensive Advocacy Software Platform

Advocacy software is an investment, and for many nonprofits, the most cost-effective solution is a comprehensive platform that combines advocacy, fundraising, and marketing tools in one place. 

For these nonprofits, the top advocacy platform is Springboard by Jackson River. Springboard is an enterprise-grade platform designed to help nonprofits maximize their outreach and form personal relationships with their supporters. 

When it comes to advocacy tools, Springboard provides everything your nonprofit needs to run your next campaign, including:

• Custom targeting. Create custom, impactful campaigns by targeting the exact legislators you need to. Connect with federal and state decision-makers through auto-districting tools that let you identify relevant lawmakers, leveraging the most up-to-date government data.

• User-friendly advocate tools. Earn more support by making the advocate experience as easy as possible with one-click petition signings and social sharing. 

• Social media support. Through social media integrations, supporters can easily identify and reach out to their representatives online. 

• Improved digital deliverability. With a real-time deliverability dashboard, you can ensure that your vital messages to supporters and legislators are always delivered correctly via email, social media, and Communicating with Congress (CWC).
• Donor management. Earning donations is a core part of many advocacy campaigns, providing the funding your advocacy efforts need to thrive. With Springboard’s comprehensive platform, you’ll receive access to donation management tools that turn one-time donors into lifelong supporters. 

Plus, Springboard is also powered by Salesforce. With Salesforce’s extensive customization options and first-in-class security tools, you can rest assured that you’ll have a secure, reliable platform that scales with your nonprofit. 

2. Muster: Best Advocacy Software Solution for Rep Targeting

One of the most difficult parts of any advocacy campaign is ensuring that you’re getting in touch with the right decision makers. Thanks to Muster, nonprofits can identify and confidently reach out to key legislators. 

With Muster’s nonprofit advocacy software, you’ll have access to features like these:

• Advocate district matching. Identify the districts where your advocates live, enabling you to build targeted lists of advocates. Then, when a new advocate joins your campaign, they’ll automatically be added to the list for their district.

• Email builder. Make reaching out by email simple for advocates with Muster’s intuitive email builder. Create message templates that advocates can use to craft emails to their representatives. Plus, with auto-filtering features, you can ensure advocates only receive messages about campaigns happening in their district. 

• Embeddable action forms. Enable advocates to take action right from your website with customizable, embeddable action forms. Use Muster’s user-friendly code to start adding professional forms for signing petitions, sending emails, and more to your website. 

3. VoterVoice: Best Advocacy Software for Digital Campaigns

When it comes to digital grassroots advocacy campaigns, VoterVoice boasts guaranteed deliverability rates backed by innovative AI and hands-on support from their 24/7 technical support team. VoterVoice serves associations, corporations, and nonprofits, providing advocacy software that includes these top features: 

• Easy multi-channel communication. Get in touch with as many advocates as possible on as many platforms as possible with VoterVoice’s message creation tools for email, text message, and multimedia message (MMS). Generate pre-filled template messages that supporters can easily edit and send to their representatives to make being an advocate easy. 

• Legislator scorecards. Keep your advocates informed about their local lawmakers with legislator scorecards that let them know where their representatives stand on the issues that matter. 

• Year-round engagement tools. Maintain momentum from your last advocacy campaign by staying in touch with your supporters throughout the year. VoterVoice makes building connections easy with newsletter templates, surveys, and petition creation tools.

4. MobileAction!: Best Advocacy App for Nonprofits Using Blackbaud

Built on Blackbaud Luminate Online, MobileAction! by DNL OmniMedia is a mobile app designed to help nonprofits run advocacy and peer-to-peer texting campaigns. MobileAction! is a donor-facing app, meaning it’s designed for your nonprofit’s supporters to download and start advocating on your nonprofit’s behalf. Take advantage of this functionality with features like:

• In-app direct actions. As soon as supporters download the MobileAction! app, they are empowered to direct actions right from the app, like sending direct messages to friends to spread the word about your campaign or calling their representatives. 

• Pre-set messages and information fields. MobileAction! makes sending messages easy for advocates by providing them with pre-filled messages and contact information for key advocacy targets, like local legislators. 

• Compatibility with smartphone apps. Supporters can start spreading the word about your campaign to friends and family immediately, thanks to the MobileAction! app’s ability to connect with smartphone contacts and messaging apps. 

5. Grassroots Unwired: Best Advocacy Solution for Canvassing 

Grassroots Unwired makes canvassing easy, allowing nonprofits to do away with disorganized paper forms and clipboards in place of a reliable online system. With Grassroots Unwired’s mobile canvassing software, nonprofits can get in touch with supporters face-to-face, thanks to tools like:

• Turf management features. Manage your canvassing team by easily dividing turf. Create turf assignments for specific dates and assign canvassers to specific areas where they’ll thrive. 

• Robust script branching. Do away with flipping through pages of heavy script books. Prepare your canvassers for any conversation by providing them with a robust script they can navigate with just a few button presses.

• Real-time reporting. Stay on top of how all of your campaign’s canvassers are doing with real-time updates. Navigate challenges and seize opportunities by viewing how many doors they’ve knocked on, the number of signatures they’ve collected, and if they’ve earned any donations. 

6. OneClickPolitics: Best Advocacy Software for Scaling 

OneClickPolitics aims to make running an advocacy campaign as simple and easy as possible. With its email, texting, and social media tools, OneClickPolitics is designed to help nonprofits scale up their campaigns to reach more supporters, enabling them to spread their message as far and wide as possible. 

A few key features of OneClickPolitics’ advocacy software are: 

• Multi-channel communication tools. With OneClickPolitics, you can get in touch with legislators and advocates alike on a number of communication channels. This includes the ability to create and send video messages, allowing nonprofits to generate video testimonials of advocates and send them to representatives. 

• Message creation assistance. Having trouble writing messages to legislators? With OneClickPolitics’ generative AI tool, you can easily create template messages that advocates can leverage at scale. Additionally, the message rotator tool allows nonprofits to create multiple email subject lines and body texts. Then, users can mix and match them, decreasing the likelihood of messages being marked as spam.

• Comprehensive dashboard. Manage multiple campaigns at once from a unified dashboard. With just one account, nonprofits with affiliates and chapters can allow each branch of their organizations to run their own campaigns with ease. 

7. Quorum: Best Advocacy Software for Public Affairs Management

If your goal is to influence specific policies, Quorum is your go-to public affairs management software. Serving businesses, PACs, and nonprofits, Quorum can provide your organization with a robust set of tools to influence lawmakers, mobilize advocates, and build grassroots movements. 

A few of Quorum’s top advocacy features for nonprofits include:

• Advocate management. Segment your supporters by location, engagement history, and other relevant characteristics to build relationships and alert advocates about campaign initiatives relevant to them.  

• Year-round engagement tools. Grassroots movements require consistent nurturing, and Quorum helps nonprofits maintain advocate engagement even in between campaigns with its website design builder, gamification features, and digital targeting tools. 

• AI assistant. Quorum provides nonprofits with Quincy, an AI chat that can identify campaign performance trends, help users brainstorm advocacy strategies, and retrieve the information you need with natural-language searches.  

8. Bonterra: Best AI-Powered Advocacy Platform

Bonterra is a comprehensive nonprofit software platform that includes everything from case management software to specialized industry tools. Nonprofits already using Bonterra or those interested in investing in a unified system can explore its advocacy platform, built on the previously popular solution, EveryAction.

With Bonterra, your nonprofit can gain access to features like: 

• AI-driven supporter journeys. Bonterra is the only unified CRM offering AI-powered fundraising and advocacy software. Leverage that platform’s AI tools to get a complete view of your advocates and create personalized supporter journeys for each individual at scale. 

• One-click advocacy activities. Bonterra’s FastAction network consists of over 25 million supporter profiles, boosting conversions by drawing on this database to auto-fill forms. Leveraging this data, supporters can have advocacy activities essentially completed for them, turning lengthy outreach initiatives into simple, one-click actions. 

• Advanced legislator matching and deliverability. Ensure supporters reach the right representatives and have their messages delivered with Bonterra’s advocate matching tools. Message templates for supporters will automatically populate their representatives’ names and districts. Then, Bonterra explores every avenue to ensure messages are delivered, sending them first through individual representatives’ website contact forms, then via email, and finally by fax, for a 99.6% deliverability rate. 

9. CharityEngine: Best Advocacy Platform for Small Nonprofits

CharityEngine is an all-in-one CRM for small and growing nonprofits. Among its many features, CharityEngine provides users with basic advocacy tools, allowing them to run campaigns on a budget. If your nonprofit is looking for a simple, out-of-the-box advocacy platform, explore CharityEngine’s top features, like: 

• All-in-one CRM. As an all-in-one solution, CharityEngine enables nonprofits to easily access all of their data—from supporter information to fundraising progress to advocacy campaign data—in one central location. Plus, nonprofits can use this interconnectivity to create comprehensive supporter profiles that record all of their fundraising and advocacy activity. 

• Multi-channel communication. Create a message template, then translate it to a variety of platforms, including email, blog posts, and social media posts. This allows you to spread the word quickly and inspire action across numerous channels. 

• Fast setup. Launch your campaign in minutes with the ability to create custom issue pages from one platform. Then, reach out to supporters through that platform to start generating momentum and get eyes on your target issue. 

10. NationBuilder: Best Advocacy Software for Website Building

NationBuilder positions itself as a human-centered advocacy platform, prioritizing the advocate experience with a user-friendly website builder. With its website and communication tools, NationBuilder empowers your supporters to create user-generated content that reflects their personal experiences, adding a personal touch to their advocacy messages.

With NationBuilder, your nonprofit can access features like: 

• Website builder. Websites are essential for advocacy campaigns, and NationBuilder equips nonprofits to create dedicated advocacy sites that engage visitors and encourage them to take action. Leverage conversion-focused templates and customize your site to match your nonprofit’s brand. 

• Comprehensive database. NationBuilder describes its database as a “people database,” encouraging nonprofits to create dynamic, unique supporter journeys for all advocates. 

• Advocacy toolkit. NationBuilder provides nonprofits with a full suite of advocacy software through ActionButton. Make it easy for advocates to contact their representatives right from your website through customizable, embeddable action forms. 

More Advocacy Software Resources for Nonprofits

Advocacy campaigns are a valuable tool in your nonprofit’s arsenal, enabling you to influence legislators and promote political change. Advocacy software makes these campaigns possible, and nonprofits interested in expanding their efforts to include advocacy initiatives should thoroughly research top vendors before investing. 

To help your nonprofit make an informed decision about its software and advocacy efforts, explore these additional resources:

• 15 Top Salesforce Donation Apps to Power Fundraising Results. Salesforce is one of the top platforms for all nonprofit initiatives, including advocacy campaigns. If your nonprofit uses Salesforce, discover other top fundraising and marketing apps to assist your advocacy efforts. 
• Salesforce Donation Processing: How It Works for Nonprofits. Before starting your advocacy campaign, ensure your nonprofit is equipped to handle incoming donations supporting your efforts. Learn how top platforms like Salesforce process donations.  
• 7 Salesforce Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Tools to Deepen Impact. Peer-to-peer communication and fundraising often go hand in hand with advocacy campaigns. Discover top peer-to-peer fundraising platforms that can complement your advocacy efforts.