Today I’m pleased to announce the first phase of a really exciting upcoming Mobile Commons project.

Mobile Commons’ platform is a complete tool for nonprofits mobile programs—people can raise money, generate huge responses, and participate in effective advocacy. One of the best ways to generate telephone calls for fundraising or advocacy is mConnect, our product that lets you send out a broadcast text message with an embedded phone number. Users call, hear audio talking points, and are transferred to a destination.

In the advocacy space, our customers often want to connect people to their legislators or target specific legislators. Wouldn’t it be cool if users were automatically routed directly to their legislator without having to go through the congressional switchboard? We thought so too! But first we needed a way to determine a person’s legislator…

Today we are releasing a database for querying congressional and state legislators by latitude & longitude.

There are two parts to this project:

• An open-source application and database that you can host yourself
• A publicly available web service that anyone can use: http://congress.mcommons.com

This was the first phase of our legislative targeting. In the next few weeks, we’ll finish integrating this data into all our products. Soon you will be able to send targeted messages to constituents in a city, state, radius, or specific legislative district. When users make advocacy phone calls, we will automatically route them directly to their legislator. Stay tuned!

Learn more about our legislative lookup project on our Developer site, or try it out at http://congress.mcommons.com.