Everyone has an issue that directly affects his or her business. Whether it is copyright laws or taxes, everyone has a piece of legislation on the Capitol Hill that they would like to have their say in. That’s why groups and businesses have been spending millions of dollars on targeted ads on local television.
But there is a startup site in Northern Virginia that may offer businesses access to a more affordable means of sending messages to Congress than TV ads: the grass-roots movement. And they don’t charge a penny. Grasshopr.com is a social networking site for activists but one that is loaded with great data.
With a few clicks you can search by issue and come up with a comprehensive list of all legislation pending on the Hill. If you were to click the “Legislation” tab and then click on “Taxation,” you would get a list of current tax legislation. You might take a gander at Bill S99, the Ethical Stem Cell Research Tax Credit Act of 2009, which would give a 30 percent tax credit to labs that perform stem cell research.
Ideally you would click on the legislation and get a synopsis of the bill. Below the bill you could see comments from supporters or detractors. Then you could connect with like-minded people and groups to support.
Something more pertinent to businesses in Richmond would be a capital gains tax cut for small businesses proposed by John Kerry that would expand the definition of “small business” from companies that gross less than $50 million annually to $100 million. If your business wanted to hook up with or support grass-roots activists supporting this bill, Grasshopr.com would be a destination for that.
Like all social networking sites, you start out with the tedious task of building your profile, uploading a picture of yourself and painstakingly entering pertinent information that can connect people with your specific interests.
Once on the site, you can write a blog, track legislation, connect with other members and even build an event calendar. A list of your national and local representatives is built into your profile based on the location information that you have put in. Each representative has a profile with contact information. So the site is a repository for all kinds of useful information, far above that of normal social networking sites, which seem to thrive on whatever drivel its users spew out.
The downsides? Well, there aren’t many people on it right now. It’s a little more than a week old, and it hasn’t caught like a California brush fire just yet. I didn’t even find a group dedicated to health care yet.
So if this thing catches on, it could be a truly useful site for businesses that have interests on the Hill. When you get down to it, every business has an interest in pending legislation, and now there could be a cost-effective way of getting involved.
David Larter covers technology for BizSense. Please send news tips to David@richmondbizsense.com.
