ControlShift vs DearMEP

ControlShift is a platform for progressive organizations and campaigns to coordinate distributed events, local groups, petitions, and supporter-led campaigns. Supporters can create or attend local events from organization templates, while staff review submissions, coach hosts, track activity, and measure results. Members can find nearby groups or organize new ones, with mailing lists and directories for coordination. Petition campaigns can use distributed targets and templated content under organizational moderation and approval. Organizations can approve group leaders and give them communication, event, and campaign tools, including tactics such as petition delivery. The platform supports 15 languages, including Arabic and Hebrew, and runs through web and API access. Integrations include CRMs, Amazon Redshift, SQL databases, Segment, Facebook, Matomo, Google Analytics, Freshchat, and Customer.io. Developer tools include authenticated REST APIs, webhooks, JSONP, and bulk data. Data is stored in a selected AWS US-East or EU-Central region. Pricing is on request.

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.