Ever wish you could reach your elected officials as easily as texting a friend? 📱 That’s where Resistbot comes in! Powered by TextIt, Resistbot’s platform allows users to make a difference simply by texting in keywords. Whether you're on Apple Messages, Telegram, Instagram, Messenger, or SMS—Resistbot is ready to help you take quick action.
What began as a simple text-based tool has grown into a powerful platform that makes civic engagement accessible, immediate, and impactful.
From the start, Resistbot’s platform demonstrated extraordinary reach. Within the first 100 days, it had facilitated over 55 million text messages, sent 3.6 million pages via fax, and engaged nearly 700,000 users. Over the next seven years, it grew to more than 9.7 million users, exchanged over half a billion texts, and delivered 33 million letters to elected officials. While many civic tech startups struggled or folded, Resistbot continued to grow.
Your message can become a powerful campaign that delivers millions of emails, faxes, or postal mail to lawmakers across the country 📬. Unlike traditional petitions, Resistbot makes sure every message gets to the right officials—instantly. No need to chase signatures or print anything. Just write, send, and make a difference 🙌
But Resistbot is more than messaging. Its platform uses TextIt’s features to allow users to:
Unlike traditional petitions, Resistbot ensures every message reaches the appropriate official as a direct communication, increasing the likelihood of impact. One of its most effective—and clever—features? Faxing. Yep, Documo's Fax API makes it possible for a single text to be turned into a fax sent directly to your senator. It’s an overlooked but surprisingly effective way to get the message across. They have also sent over 59,000 physical letters just in the past four months using Lob, a direct mail automation service.
Jason Putorti, Executive Director & Co-Founder of Resistbot
I’ve been thinking about technology and politics since 2008, and built something similar in 2010, Votizen, which was acquired and put on the shelf. The huge wave of citizen activism after the 2016 election drove me to want to bring it back, but this time with no “app” to make it more accessible and lower friction, and a chatbot was the medium to do it.
There have been so many over the past eight years. I remember a Congressional staffer calling us, "the bot that saved the Affordable Care Act." Top of mind is when we drove probably 5 million letters to Congress about the U.S. Postal Service alone, which moved Speaker Pelosi to bring everyone back from recess. The move saved democratic participation during the pandemic. We’ve also boosted voter turnout in every election we’ve done an academic study on, so even if people discount the constituent pressure and how we engage people between elections, votes are still counted.
Besides the impact, success to me is new users continuing to come in the front door every day by the hundreds or thousands, tens of thousands of users returning every day, and the thousands of paid members who care enough to want to keep us going. We’ve had over 10 million people text 50409 or engage with us on the other platforms we’ve expanded to since we launched. A few years ago we also launched the ability for organizers to create their own actions, gain followers, and push them out; like a social network within the bot. Our largest organizer recently reached 77,000 followers, and we have many that have gone from zero to tens of thousands in a few months. One thing I love to see is folks using us as a call to action in TikTok videos or reels, everyone that does is turning emotional activation into something real.
Our north star has always been to build something that normal people want to use, which is very different from most civic technology that is more built around fundraising and generally taking the energy of activists and exploiting it in one way or another. The last really successful product I designed was in personal finance, which is another thing that nobody really wants to do, but Mint was simple, delightful, and unique for its time. Minimal effort to input, maximum value in the output, there’s a lot of similarities.
Balancing instant availability, usage spikes, and massive databases with low cost has always been difficult. Our usage patterns fit venture-funded growth companies more than the nonprofit we actually are. And of course the decision early on to be SMS first (expensive) and build from there, where most technology platforms will start from the web (free), has been incredibly challenging. We’ve rebuilt our infrastructure on the fly without going down a few times now, while continuing to build more powerful organizing features that drive even more intense usage.
Congress doesn’t want constituent pressure, and the trend over decades has been to remove that accountability piece by piece. Gerrymandering, slowly dismantling the Voting Rights Act, Citizens United, even the Apportionment Act of 1929, these things have all made the country less democratic and government less broadly accountable. And on the reverse side, the Internet has made it relatively easy, compared to 50 years ago, to organize mass action, thereby becoming more discounted by those in power. (Whether it’s protests, calls, or emails.) I’ve been thinking about these opposing trends for 15 years now, but with Trump ignoring court orders we have something new which is the rule of law breaking down. We have been building for this for almost a year now, and it will help inform and empower people to engage at all levels of government in a decentralized way, mindful of the need to create unexpected results. We live under many democracies, and while the federal government can be tough to lobby, your state and local government is more responsive and one person or a few people can make a bigger difference there.
Whether it’s purpose-driven or not you need to solve a problem for people, and make them feel powerful.
For the team behind Resistbot, their platform—powered by TextIt—is more than just a civic tool. It’s a foundation for a more representative democracy, built through consistent, meaningful, and widespread participation.
Whether you're fighting for change, protecting democracy, or simply checking if you’re registered to vote—Resistbot puts the power of action in its users' hands.
Ready to raise your voice? Just text RESIST to 50409 and see how easy making a difference can be.
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