College students around the country greeted Donald Trump’s presidential victory by joining protests, volunteering for political campaigns and registering to vote.

Four Stanford undergrads had a more typical Silicon Valley response: build an app.

The result is Pulse, a new service that helps connect voters more directly with their member of Congress. The non-partisan app, which launched in beta in July, is designed to lower the barrier to entry in politics by allowing registered voters to tell their representative what they think about high-profile legislation.

The app was intended to help combat voter apathy and dissatisfaction with Congress in particular, said Drake Hougo, a 20-year-old junior from Santa Clarita who’s the CEO of the nascent company.

“We saw in 2016 that people didn’t feel heard by their representatives,” Hougo said. “We wanted to use technology to give people a voice.”

Hougo and his fellow developers — Jackson Eilers, Sean O’Bannon and Andrew Quirk — were freshmen at Stanford when Trump notched his surprise win, prompting protest marches and hand-wringing on the idyllic, palm-lined campus, which voted for Hillary Clinton by over 80 percent.

“All my friends who didn’t care about politics were suddenly reading the news,” Hougo said. “There was much more focus after the election on being more informed and getting involved politically.”

Still, there seemed to be a lack of agency when it came to translating that newfound political fervor into real impact, he said: “Even if people are furious, pissed off and yelling at their TV, no one’s really acting on it.”

The app is aimed at making it easier. When people sign up, Pulse cross-references the voter file to confirm that new users are registered voters in the district they claim to live in. That way, members of Congress know they’re getting feedback from the people who will decide whether they keep their job or get the boot.

Users can then vote on whether they support different bills in Congress on a wide range of issues from immigration reform to net neutrality, and leave messages for their representative. The team tries to simplify complicated legislation, explaining bills and presenting information from strictly non-partisan sources. Members of Congress can also communicate back to their constituents, explaining why they voted on different bills.

The Trump era has already prompted a groundswell in some forms of congressional activism, with controversies from the attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act to the president’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court prompting new waves of emails and calls flooding congressional mailboxes and jamming phone lines.

But the Pulse developers hope to give members of Congress a way to understand the feedback they’re getting.

The app started in a pilot program in mid-July with the campaign of Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin. So far, more than 400 voters have signed up, voting on an average of more than a dozen bills per user.

The third-term congressman — who’s also an avid user of social media apps like Snapchat — says he’s liked how the app lets him get the viewpoints of constituents who might not have the time to show up at his town hall meetings or visit his office.

“We’re trying anything if it can help us connect with more people,” Swalwell said in an interview. “For a lot of people now, social media is their civic town square.”

For example, he said, 68 percent of Pulse users in his district supported his legislation that would ban and buyback assault rifles — a proposal that’d be highly controversial in many other districts around the country.

The service is also working with two Southern California congressional candidates, Democrats Gil Cisneros and Mike Levin, to provide them data from users in their respective districts. The Pulse team is also hoping to recruit Republicans going forward, Hougo said.

Eventually, the developers — a mix of computer and political science majors — hope to sell congressional campaigns and offices access to their platform, and a more direct connection to local voters.

“The goal,” Hougo said, “is to make Washington, D.C., feel a whole lot closer to home.”