In an effort to shed light on the pervasive influence of money in politics, the team at Appletree MediaWorks created this online tool using API integration to empower Americans with an easy way to find out which moneyed interests might be affecting their Congressional representatives’ decision making. We designed this project to be self-sustaining by pulling in data from various political APIs (such as OpenSecrets and the Sunlight Foundation) and merging the information into pages and images in real time.

Our programmers incorporated dynamic image generation technology to create summary graphs from the data, making them easy to share on Facebook. When people saw these shared images, many grew curious and clicked to look up their own representatives, which ultimately drove fresh traffic back to the site.