Campaign tools for coalitions across the Asia-Pacific.

What Suara is

Suara means voice: a vote, a say in a decision. It is a tool for the people who run advocacy campaigns across the Asia-Pacific, and it is built for coalitions from the start.

The tools that already exist for this work were built for Western campaigns, where the point of the campaign is often to raise money. They assume fast internet, an email address, English, and a paid subscription to a service hosted in the United States. They exclude most of the people doing the actual work across Southeast Asia, Timor-Leste and the Pacific.

What it does

Suara is where a coalition plans a campaign and runs it. You can map who holds power over the decision you want changed, and who can move them. Each coalition gets its own shared space. Actions get planned there, with a record of who is doing what. Agreed messages live in one place. There are training tools for bringing new people in.

It is built for the conditions organisers in the region actually work in: cheap phones, a connection that drops out, coalitions whose members work in different languages, and in some places a real risk that someone is watching. A volunteer can be useful within minutes of joining. A campaign lead can map power, coordinate the coalition and plan strategy from the same screen.

The coalition

Advocacy in the region is done by coalitions: several organisations, many of the same people in each, and no shared system between them. Today that coordination runs on spreadsheets, online forms, WhatsApp groups and goodwill.

Suara replaces that without anyone ending up in charge of everyone else's data. Each organisation keeps its own. The coalition shares only what it agrees to share. Leaving takes one step.

What it doesn't do

Suara is clear about what it will not do. No fundraising. No petitions. No scoring of supporters by how much they might give or how often they turn up. No social media scheduling. No usage data sent back to us. Each absence is a decision, made to protect the people the tool exists to serve.

How it's held

Suara is a project of OpenImpact Studio, run as a public good. Each coalition runs its own copy, and can run it on its own servers if it wants to. What you run belongs to you. No company can buy it, lean on it or switch it off. There is no venture capital behind it.

Get in touch

Suara is still being built and we are looking for founding coalition partners to shape it with us. If your organisation does advocacy work across the Asia-Pacific, write to us at hello@openimpact.studio.