Switchgrass Engage

Action that reaches the people who actually decide.

Most advocacy tools send your members' messages to their own legislator. When a bill is sitting in committee, that is usually the wrong address. The seven to eighteen people on that committee decide whether it ever reaches a floor. Engage knows the difference, and reports back what your members really did.

We run it

Managed campaigns

Hand-built, full service

You tell us what's moving and what your members need to do. We build the campaign, write the templates, target the right committee, and run it through the hearing, usually in days, because when a bill is live there is no time for a project plan.

  • Built and launched for you
  • Strategy from a registered SD lobbyist
  • Lives on your domain or ours
  • Reporting delivered after the vote
See campaigns we've run
You run it

Engage

Self-serve platform

Your team creates campaigns directly. Pick the bill or docket, and Engage resolves who receives it, builds the templates, and opens the campaign page. The legislative data underneath is the same data we use: committee memberships, hearing dates, and verified legislator addresses.

  • Create a campaign in minutes, not days
  • Committee routing resolved automatically
  • Embed on your own site, or link out
  • Live reporting you can show a board
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Action

Getting a message from a member's kitchen table to the right inbox, in a form that counts when it lands.

Routing that follows the bill

A bill in committee, a bill on the floor, and a docket in front of a commission need three different address books. Engage picks the right one and re-resolves it as the bill moves, so nobody is re-copying an email list the week of a hearing.

Templates that ask for one sentence

Agencies and committee staff bucket near-identical messages and discount them. Every template opens with a specific question, what this costs you or what your town loses, in a box that is prominent, pre-focused, and never required. Twenty messages somebody wrote beat two hundred nobody did.

Your members send it themselves

The message opens in the member's own email, from their own address. Nothing is ever sent on their behalf, which is exactly why a legislator reads it as a constituent writing rather than an organization filing.

Required fields handled up front

Regulators reject comments missing a full name, a mailing address, or the docket number. That is why so many calls to action end up asking members to perform eight manual steps. Engage collects them once and inserts them.

How a message gets addressed
The committee of record Bill in committee

Every member of the committee hearing the bill, typically 7 to 18 people, with the chair and vice chair identified.

Their own legislators Bill on the floor

Matched from the member's address once the bill has cleared committee and the whole chamber votes.

The filing address Agency docket

The commission's comment address, with the docket number and required fields attached automatically.

Why this matters: while a bill sits in committee, messages to the other ninety-odd legislators change nothing that week. Sending to the right room is most of the work, and it is the part a generic action form cannot do.

Tracking

Numbers you can put in front of a board, a client, or a legislator, including the honest limits of what any tool can actually observe.

What can and cannot be measured
1
Opened the campaign page
2
Started an action
3
Wrote something of their own
Directly observed above
4
Confirmed they sent it
5
Appeared in the public record

Nobody can see a sent email. Handing off to a member's own mail client is what makes the message theirs, and it also means delivery cannot be watched. Engage reports self-confirmation separately from action counts, and never presents either as "comments filed." Where a regulator publishes filings, those get counted from the regulator's own record instead of ours.

Committee coverage, member by member

Before a hearing, the useful question is not how many messages went out. It is which committee members heard from someone in their own district, and which heard from nobody. That gap tells you where a campaign is thin while there is still time to fix it.

Personalization rate as a headline

The share of members who added their own words, reported as prominently as the total. Most tools bury this because it makes their volume look smaller. It is the number that predicts whether the messages landed.

District and county reach

How far across the state a campaign actually travelled, so "our members responded" becomes a map rather than an adjective.

A count that can't be inflated

Action records are constrained at the database level to a live campaign inside its window. A number anyone on the internet could pad is worth nothing, and proof is the entire point.

Built from campaigns that already ran.

Engage is not a product designed in the abstract. Every opinion in it came from running these campaigns by hand, one legislative session at a time.

Curation is the hard part

Knowing a docket exists, when it closes, and what the commission actually weighs is judgment, not software. The tool exists to make that judgment scale.

Speed decides outcomes

A hearing gets scheduled with a few days' notice. Campaigns that take a month to build arrive after the vote, which is the same as not building them.

Local data beats national tools

National vendors ship a generic action form. None of them carry South Dakota committee memberships, voting records, or hearing dates underneath it.

See every campaign we've run

Let's start with a conversation.

Tell us what your members need to do. We'll tell you what it takes to get them there.

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