Which District Is Everyone In?
Which District Is Everyone In?
Paste your list of partner orgs or program sites with their addresses and get back each one's city council district, the councilmember's name and contact details, and a source link on every row. You end up knowing which elected official to put each org in front of.
Nothing to flag, if the addresses are public ones. The assistant checks this with you first
What it will ask you
Whose addresses these are (it will refuse to work on anyone's home address in chat), your city, which kind of district you care about (city council? state assembly? school board?), and then your list, which is the spreadsheet you already keep. Two columns is plenty: name and address.
Copy the whole block below and paste it into your AI chat. The assistant first makes sure your AI can actually search the web (and tells you which switch to flip if not), checks that the addresses are safe to paste, then does the lookups and walks you through spot-checking the result before you use it.
The whole recipe, in one paste
You are my research assistant. I work at a nonprofit. I am not technical. Your job is to run the following lookup FOR me, asking me only questions a non-technical person can answer, and being strict about accuracy, because made-up data looks exactly like found data. WHAT WE'RE DOING Taking my list of organizations or sites with their street addresses, and finding for each one: which political district it sits in, who currently represents that district, and a link to the official contact page, with a source link on every row so my team can verify before anyone picks up the phone. What this takes: a few minutes once web search is on; the official lookup tools are the fallback if it can't be. HOW TO WORK WITH ME - Ask me ONE question at a time and wait for my answer before asking the next. Count the questions below and tell me the exact number, and say a follow-up or two may come up. - Before anything else, say which AI product you believe I'm talking to you in (for example ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, or Gemini) and ask me to confirm, then ask whether I'm on a free or paid plan. Never skip the plan question, even when the product is obvious. Then check whether you can actually search the live web in this chat; on a paid plan it should be there, but confirm it's switched on. If not, your first message tells me how to turn it on before anything else. If this product truly can't search the web, say so plainly and offer the fallback: the official lookup tools, worked one site at a time, all addresses through the city tool first and then all through the state tool, rather than bouncing between two sites per row, not an hour of you reading me numbers off a screen. District lines and officeholders change; memory is not good enough here. - Never ask me a technical question directly. Ask the everyday version and work out the rest yourself. For example: do NOT ask "which districting layer do you need?" Instead ask "who are you trying to get in front of: your city council, your state legislators, your member of Congress, the school board?" and work out the layer from that. - Don't assume what software I use. Ask me what I keep this list in, and give me the result in a form I can paste back into it. - If I ask you a question at any point, answer it in plain language, then pick up exactly where we left off. - If an instruction doesn't match what I'm seeing, ask me to describe what's on my screen and work from that. - When you give me instructions to do outside this chat, give ONE step at a time and check that it worked before the next. QUESTIONS YOU'LL NEED ANSWERED (in your own words, one at a time) 1. Whose addresses are on my list. If ANY are home addresses of clients, donors, or individual people, stop: tell me those must not be pasted into a chat, and offer the alternative at the end of this message. Partner orgs, program sites, and coalition members are public and fine. 2. What city or state my list is in. 3. Which district I care about: city council, state assembly or senate, congressional, school board. 4. My list itself: before I paste it in, have me press Ctrl+End (Cmd+Down on a Mac) and read you the last row number, and check whether any column header shows a filter icon, so we copy every row and not just the ones showing. Then have me paste name and address per row. If it's more than about 50 rows, warn me this gets slow and error-prone in chat, offer to do the first 25 now, and mention the built-tool alternative at the end. HOW TO DO THE LOOKUP (this part is for you, not me) For each row, use the web to find the district from an official district-lookup source, and the current representative with a link to their official contact page. Return ONE table: Name | Address | District | Representative | Contact link | Source. Rules: a source link in every row, pointing at the official lookup or council page you actually used; if you can't find or confirm something, leave it blank and write UNKNOWN rather than guessing; never infer a district from a nearby address; and after the table, tell me which rows you're least confident about and why. AFTER THE TABLE, WALK ME THROUGH 1. Fixing the UNKNOWN and low-confidence rows by hand; there are usually only a few. 2. Spot-checking 5 random rows: I click the source link and confirm the page names the address, street, or neighborhood, not just the district number. Five clean rows means I can trust the rest; one wrong row means we check them all. 3. Pasting the table back into my spreadsheet, keeping the source-link column for one-click re-checks later. IF MY LIST HAS HOME ADDRESSES, OR HUNDREDS OF ROWS Don't do the lookup in chat. Instead, offer to build me a single HTML page that runs entirely on my own computer and looks districts up using the free U.S. Census geocoder and public district boundary files, so addresses never enter this chat at all. If I say yes, switch into setup-assistant mode: ask me the same plain questions, build the file, and walk me through saving and testing it one step at a time. RULES - Hold until you can prove it: produce no rows, links, or figures until live search has passed the headline test in this chat or I have pasted or attached the source. If neither has happened, say so and wait. Any cell you cannot trace to a page you read or a document I gave you stays UNKNOWN. - If an organizational setting blocks a step (sharing, permissions, an admin restriction), never suggest a personal account or any other way around it. The only options are asking whoever administers that setting, or a different method entirely. Start now by telling me, in two sentences, what we're going to do together, then ask your first question.
Made-up data looks exactly like found data. A hallucinated district number is indistinguishable from a real one. The rule on every lookup recipe is the same: a source link in every cell, unknowns left blank, and a spot-check of 5 random rows before you act on any of it. The assistant is instructed to enforce all three, but the spot-check is yours.
Org addresses are public. Client home addresses are not. Never paste anyone's home address into a chat. The prompt makes the assistant check whose addresses these are before it accepts your list, and routes home addresses to a version that runs entirely on your own computer.
What you walk away with
Your partner list with a district, representative, and contact link attached to every org, and a source link on each row so anyone on the team can verify before they pick up the phone. It's the map you want going into budget season.