Civic engagement is at the heart of what many organizations do. Whether your organization is lobbying your town reps for a better library, your governor on funding for community development, or your congressman on environmental issues, government touches every aspect of the nonprofit world.

With Azavea's cloud-based Cicero Legislative Information API, you can find and display information on your national, state, and local officials, such as mailing address, phone and fax numbers, e-mail addresses and URLs, and party and committee data. That information can be easily integrated into your constituent database, used to add legislative lookup tools to your website, and paired with up-to-date maps to run targeted mailings and advocacy campaigns in specific legislative districts.

Foundations can use Cicero to identify and lobby elected officials in districts where their institution has made major funding available. Nonprofits and libraries can add detailed maps to grant applications and reports showing the impact of their activities.

I used Cicero to check TechSoup's address, and got this great breakdown of all of our elected officials, plus our county, watershed, school district, and even local police information:

One thing that your organization should take into consideration is the volume of requests you'll use Cicero for. The Cicero donation available through TechSoup comes with 5,000 credits: one credit is used each time you send a request to Cicero's application programming interface (API).

Basically, if you stamp your database with legislative info through Cicero, you would be able to stamp 5,000 names. If you embedded the API into your website, one or two credits (depending on whether you were just district stamping or providing legislator contact information as well) would be used each time a user searches for information.

For more information, and to give the tool a quick try, head over to Cicero's website. In addition to this awesome offering for nonprofits and libraries, Cicero currently provides data to public and private web applications for newspapers, election watchdog groups, philanthropic foundations, unions, arts organizations and private commercial firms.