How do I stop receiving texts?

Text alertsManage the types of alerts I send you to manage the types of alerts you receive, or stopCancel receiving texts from the service completely to cancel the service completely.

Send subscribe changeChange the payment subscription method on your account to the bot.

How can I end my monthly sustaining donation?

Send subscribe endEnd your monthly sustaining donation to the bot.

Oops! I didn’t want to unsubscribe from everything, how do I come back?

Text oopsRejoin the resistance after unsubscribing to re-join the resistance.

I typed my name or address wrong, help!

Text accountMake sure your information is current so I can give you the right local information / representatives to see your current account settings and change what you need.

How do I contact my officials?

Text congressWrite or call your two Senators and Representative in the Congress or stateWrite to your Governor and/or state legislators to reach your federal or state elected officials, respectively; or see the full keyword guide for more. You don’t need to send resistJoin the resistance and learn what you can do first.

How much does this cost?

Resistbot is free to use on iMessage, Messenger, Twitter and Telegram. If you use the bot on SMS, you’ll need to pay whatever your mobile carrier charges you for text messages. We’d prefer you don’t use SMS as texts cost us a lot of money even if they’re free for you. Donations pay for the texts, calls, faxes, postage, and servers.

I changed my mind. I don’t want to send my letter.

Once you text send your letter is sent immediately. It doesn’t matter if it was an e-delivery, a fax, or a postal letter. There is no way for us to cancel it. Being heard in a timely manner is important, so we do not delay delivery.

Help, my messages to my officials are coming back as gibberish!

Each carrier seems to handle message encoding a little differently. As we work through all of these specific cases, you can fix this problem by removing all ‘special’ characters from your message: return breaks, directional quotes / apostrophes, symbols like %, $, etc. This should make your message go through.

I’m getting a ‘Service Access Denied’ message.

Some carriers, like T-Mobile, block “short codes” like 50409 by default. You can call your carrier and ask them to unblock short codes on your account, or we recommend using the iMessage, Messenger, Twitter or Telegram versions instead, all work better than SMS—the bot is faster and has one-touch replies that make usage simpler.

I’m a Google Fi user any messages are being broken up / cut off.

This is a problem on Google Fi’s end. If you’re using your phone’s stock messenger app the messages will come through properly. However Google Fi Android Messenger version 2.8.040 or below, will break apart the messages before getting to Resistbot. Either upgrade/try a different messaging app, or use Messenger, Twitter or Telegram, instead, all of which provide a better user experience than SMS.

What commands does Resistbot know?

See my keyword guide for a full list, you can even print it for reference.

How do letters to the editor work?

Send editorSubmit your last letter as a letter to the editor to your local paper and I can transpose the last letter you wrote to your government officals into a letter to your local paper. You can choose the paper or my humans can find one near you. My volunteers may make small edits to help your message make sense as a letter to the editor. For example changing pronouns to proper nouns (or vice versa), correcting spelling, or editing for length if needed to fit a newspaper’s maximum word count—nothing that changes what you’ve said.

If your letter is addressed to a specific goverment official, my volunteers make sure that official’s name appears in the body of the message. Members of Congress (and their staff) definitely notice when they turn up in the newspaper!

I’m sorry but you can not submit letters anonymously. Newspapers require your full name and the town you live in. Most will call or email you before publication, to confirm you are a real person.

I won’t send your message to any newspaper until you give your explicit permission at the end of our chat, and If you change your mind within 24 hours, send retract.

Why do you need my name? Address? What do you do with my information?

We need it to send your messages and calls to the officials that represent you, give them ways to respond, to sign your letters, and otherwise show you’re a real constituent. Without including this information, your message will not count. Congress throws away messages or deletes voicemails without information to verify that you’re a constituent.

We will not sell this contact information to anyone, ever, and you should never be contacted by anyone else as a result of using this service. We’ll shut down the service rather than sell data to keep it running. Here’s our full terms of use and privacy policy.

Why do you include my phone number on your letters?

Most offices wont accept letters without them, also staffers tell us they are helpful. One such staffer told us, “at least once a month I had a designated block where I called constituents in order to follow up on their letters, especially if they’d written in about something personal. And I know some offices have the Member of Congress do that from time to time.” The information on your letters whether phone, email, or address is so you can get a response.

Why did you reject my message?

Real public servants read your letters, so we want our service to respect the hard work they are doing, and for your letter to be fully considered. We understand that you may be upset about a particular issue (we are too!) but please write something you’d want read aloud on the House or Senate floor, profanity and excessive punctuation will be rejected.

Will my message really count?

Yes! According to Kathryn Schultz, who interviewed, among others, Brad Fitch of the Congressional Management Foundation:

Contrary to popular opinion… written communications are an effective way of communicating with Congress, as are their electronic kin. “Everything is read, every call and voice mail is listened to,” Isaiah Akin, the deputy legislative director for Oregon’s Senator Ron Wyden, told me. “We don’t discriminate when it comes to phone versus e-mail versus letter.” As it turns out, some less egalitarian offices do discriminate, but not in the direction you might expect. According to a 2015 C.M.F. survey of almost two hundred senior congressional staffers, when it comes to influencing a lawmaker’s opinion, personalized e-mails, personalized letters, and editorials in local newspapers all beat out the telephone.

Will I get a response?

You should! Here are some users who shared their responses. Now, there’s no way for us to know if, or how soon, they will reply, as every office is different. But, we will tell you when your message is delivered, and deliver your message in a way that can be read and responded to by your officials. Offices most often reply by postal mail or email, so including your email when prompted increases your chances of a reply. They may even call you.

You used to fax everything, what happened? Faxes are harder to ignore!

Fax was a workaround to the problem of busy phone lines early on, but as Resistbot signed up more users, it became self-defeating. Congress wasn’t designed to handle the volume of faxes our users were sending, over 5 million pages in six months, and so many offices began to pull the plug, we filled all their fax lines up, and broke at least one machine. (Sorry!) We were also getting in the way of key constituent services for veterans and other groups that still fax.

What the bot does now: it first tries to deliver electronically directly into the Congressional message system (or equivalent systems at the state level). We worked with Congress to make this possible, it is the fastest and most reliable method, and easiest for staffers to handle. If Resistbot has a problem with this system, or if state officials don’t have an electronic delivery option, it will fax, send your letter through postal mail, or volunteers will deliver by hand. You do not have to think about how your message should be sent anymore, it will send it in the most effective way possible. Read more about this change or more about effectiveness of different methods.