I love widgets. The idea of having portable, dynamic, and (often) free web content simultaneously on your own site and on your friends' and supporters' sites and blogs excites me. There's so much potential for fundraising, advocacy, and general outreach. 

A lot of you have probably heard about the recent success of a Toronto blogger who combined a fundraising widget from Chip-In with the networking power of Twitter to raise over $14k in about 2 days.

Well, we just heard about another great free widget that you and your organization might want to share with your community. "Ask Your Lawmaker" is a project of the Capitol News Connection, and they sum it up nicely in 3 phrases: 

1. You Ask: "If you had a microphone and a media pass at the U.S. Capitol, what would you ask your lawmaker?"

2. You Vote: "It’s hard for a lawmaker to dodge a question asked by, say, 13,462 people in 29 states! That’s why we want you to vote for the questions you most want answered."

3. We Get Answers: "Microphone in hand, CNC will ask at least 10 questions a day – and upload the MP3 broadcast quality audio answers to the Ask Your Lawmaker website and widget."

There are two widget templates to choose from: a general badge and a topic widget that will display the top or recent questions in the topic(s) you select. You can even narrow down your topic by issues just in your state. 

I built a topic widget for technology: