When’s the last time you wrote a letter? It’s not something we do often, but we appreciate receiving them. Letters are personal. They go to our friends and loved ones through birthday cards, best wishes, congratulations and function as a more formal way of connecting, even reconnecting. It’s the personal connection that leads letter writing to still be an effective way to reach an elected representative. We’ve all heard stories about how a kid sends a letter to a sitting president and gets some response to their request. They’re not the only ones who have that ability.
There have been a number of options that have been popular in the last few years to empower people to contact their representatives. These include methods such as Resistbot which is an automated system that sends messages to your representatives on your behalf, Change.org to create petitions and promote an issue or ads focused on social media to gather attention and traction.
What is KwikLetter?
While all of these methods are ways to make your voice heard, they lack the physical presence of a letter which can flood the mailbox of an elected official and force someone to acknowledge an issue. That’s why Jim Hicks founded KwikLetter, a mobile solution to type a letter that will be printed and physically mailed to your representative of choice for a small fee.
Not everyone has the ability to visit Washington DC and march for the issues they care about.
“The sudden realization in January 2017 of how much influence the east coast has on Washington DC was my ‘oh wow’ moment. We have friends from New York who attended a march in January 2017. That particular march and any large scale march on Washington DC has tremendous impact. They were able to take a relatively inexpensive 2 hour train ride, participate, then return home the same day,” Hicks said.
“We can’t do that from Birmingham. It’s a 12 hour bus ride, at best. I also realized how much of the US is too far away from Washington DC to attend marches. So, I wanted to come up with a way for the rest of America to have a strong impact. The more I researched, the more I realized, we need to go old school and write letters. This project originally started as ‘the million letter march’. Extensive discussions and refinement resulted in the final product, KwikLetter. KwikLetter allows you to use the technology of your phone to create letters to send to your elected representatives with the same appearance as if you sent them from home.”
A new approach to letters
KwikLetter simplifies the letter writing process and takes a digital approach to a traditional act. We’ve come to expect a digital and mobile approach in how we carry out a lot of our lives. We order prepared food, groceries, movies, medicine and just about any other product on demand for home delivery or store pick-up. Printing out letters isn’t a new concept either, considering we’ve been able to print greetings cards since the days of AOL. That approach doesn’t exist for outreach to your elected officials, but KwikLetter is hoping to resolve this.
Jim is optimistic about the growth of his business:.
“I see us getting a lot of Americans involved in politics by writing letters. Our projections have a strong growth curve. We hope to have hundreds of thousands of users within 24 months. We currently have the ability to handle 50,000 letters a day, can quickly scale to a hundred thousand letters a day, and we have the plan in place for a much higher capacity.”
KwikLetter is available to download on the App Store and Google Play Store.