Life & Work with David Turner of East Hollywood

As I started looking more deeply at them, though, I discovered a bunch of issues with this approach. After doing some research and talking with folks who work in political offices, some big problems really stood out: Many of these emails are never even read by politicians or their offices, because they’re automatically filtered out for having the exact same text over and over — or because they’re all coming from the same sender. Many of these emails are sent to the wrong people. A lot of them are targeted to people who are too “high up” and who don’t take them very seriously, like governors and congresspeople who historically aren’t swayed by constituents’ emails. Many people who *send* these emails don’t even read them before they send them. Because they’re so easy to copy-and-paste, people will just click without engaging with the message they’re putting out there, so they aren’t very effective for mobilizing a community. I was wondering if there was a way to make something that could solve these issues. Something that could shake up language between emails so they could get past politicians’ inbox filters. Something that would focus on local politics, where individual outreach can make the biggest impact. Something that engages everyday people with the message they’re sending. But also something that’s quick and easy. Something that made advocacy a little less intimidating. The idea was pretty lofty. Maybe too lofty. I concepted and scrapped 3-4 designs, worried that I may be trying to do too much with one tool. However, while stress-unpacking after a recent move, inspiration struck from an old Goosebumps “Choose Your Own Adventure” book (#19: Escape from Camp Run-For-Your-Life, for all you Stine-heads).

Keith Newman, Backend Engineer (Los Angeles, CA) Nikole Gramm, UX & Visual Designer (Seattle, WA) Alex Cope, Frontend Developer (Los Angeles, CA) Monica Barboza, Frontend Developer (Chicago, IL) Zachary Schulte, User Research Lead (Houston, TX) Oh! And I’m David Clifford Turner, Product Designer (Los Angeles, CA) Over the last year, we’ve been developing this tool during our free time and testing it with dozens of users across our communities. After several iterations, we’re getting ready to launch our beta build, and are looking for a local LA advocacy group to partner with to help build the future of progressive online outreach. Here’s an idea of what our prototype looks like (with a little sample campaign to defund a group of supervillains — wonder what all that’s about?)

I flipped through it, remembering how much I loved them: they were so quick and fun to read, and some key moments stuck with me so strongly because I remembered the decisions that I made along the way. And then it all kind of clicked. I started working on a design — a model that I called “Choose Your Own Advocacy” (admittedly, a mouthful) based off the way those books worked, with branching pathways that told a different story every time (or, in this case, wrote a different email every time). I realized that you could create something like this with a social issue, so one email campaign could create tens of thousands of unique emails!