Changemaker Lite vs DearMEP

Changemaker Lite is a self-hosted campaign toolkit for growing political movements, combining advocacy, canvassing, volunteer scheduling and newsletters. Influence campaigns can look up representatives by postal code, send tracked advocacy emails and collect responses. Its mobile canvassing map supports live GPS, walking routes, visit recording and outcome tracking. Shift scheduling provides public signup, confirmation emails, cut assignment and capacity management. The Listmonk newsletter feature includes subscriber management, templates and analytics, with unlimited subscribers listed. Named integrations include Rocket.Chat, Gancio, Listmonk, n8n, Gitea, NocoDB and Vaultwarden. Deployment documentation covers Docker Compose and options including a reverse proxy, tunnel or private VPN. An included script backs up PostgreSQL databases and uploaded media, with optional S3 upload. REST endpoints cover authentication, campaigns, locations, shifts, media and more. The Self-Hosted plan is free, billed forever, and includes all 45+ campaign tools, unlimited users and data, community support and use of your own infrastructure. The homepage describes the product as beta and under active development, with possible breaking changes.

DearMEP is free, open-source software that helps citizens contact elected representatives in the European Parliament. Users can call once or schedule daily or weekly calls, and can also contact politicians by email or social media. The system chooses a representative from the user's country whom it estimates may be persuadable, using voting behavior and feedback. NGOs and activists can adapt the tool for campaigns and other assemblies, or embed a customizable widget on a campaign website. The widget detects the browser language and also lets visitors choose a language; campaign URLs must be added to the instance's allowed origins. DearMEP offers API documentation for advanced integrations and custom client implementations, and is available as web software, an API, or self-hosted software. A new instance requires an account with 46elks, its calling provider. The project says it minimizes personal-data processing and follows privacy-by-design and privacy-by-default, with GDPR compliance. Its privacy design document says IP addresses are used for geolocation and abuse prevention but are not persisted by the application itself; the document notes that some described functionality may not be implemented.