Hey folks,

A friend and I built a bike share advocacy group called "Our Bikes" in SF because the local providers (JUMP and Ford GoBike) were facing resistance expanding (https://bit.ly/2vQ4MX0).

Check it out: https://ourbikes.org

Source code: https://github.com/bradwilliford/ourbikes

On the tech side, we found change.org and other petition sites to be a headache. In many cases, they won't let you directly have the emails of your supporters. Plus, we wanted to customize everything. So I bought a domain name, built the site, shared on Twitter, and things took off! We got some local press (https://bit.ly/2PxseRo) and we ended up with 950+ supporters for our petition.

We wanted to keep the momentum going. Since we have each supporter's neighborhood, we've been following up by email whenever there's a bike share station potentially coming to a supporter's area.

In terms of action, we wanted supporters to be able to easily email their elected officials, but not spam those elected officials with a ton of repetitive form letters. To solve for this, we came up with various combinations of emails and personalized each with the supporter's name and neighborhood. This keeps the emails to our officials feeling much more organic and response has been positive.

So far the JUMP bike cap in San Francisco has gone from 250 to 500 with our support, and several new Ford GoBike stations have been approved! It's led to a ton of interesting ideas and discussions - a highlight being connecting with JUMP's CEO and team.

Wanted to share and encourage folks to organize around issues they care about. It doesn't have to be a ton of effort and can be a fun side project. Check out the code, Sketch files, etc and start your own advocacy group today.

-Brad