Communications Cloud

Our API allows you to benefit from our powerful systems in highly customized ways, connecting our communications tools with your existing systems and allowing you to streamline processes such as:

• Reaching out to and registering citizens for a task force
• Automatically contacting opted-in citizens about new documents in your policy database
• Create custom dashboards to report on the effectiveness of communications with citizens

Note: we also offer a JSONP API for creating subscriptions. Read all about it here.

Before You Begin

Learn About Some Common Uses

The examples below detail some of the most common uses of GovDelivery's Communications Cloud version 1 API. These examples are meant to function like recipes, listing the ingredients (methods) required to accomplish a task.

Automatically Send Content From Your CMS Upon Creation

Batch and Sync Subscribers With a Directory

Create Topics from Another Database

Get a Developer

Creating custom integrations using our APIs requires programming skills. Many of our clients engage contract programmers for this purpose. If you do not have access to a programmer, contact Customer Support at support@granicus.com to ask about the professional development services we can provide.

Get Access

Before you can create custom integrations using our APIs, you must contact Customer Support at support@granicus.com. They will provide you with an authorization token, a development environment, and other necessary information, such as account details, to start you down the API programming path. 

Log In

In order to develop with our API, you will need the following information from the Communications Cloud interface.

• The account code
  If you're a project manager or Communications Cloud user, you can find your account code on the Account Settings page in the Communications Cloud administrative interface. If you're a developer, talk to your project manager to get the account code.
  
• A user name and password
  If you're a project manager or Communications Cloud user with appropriate access, you can create a new user in the Communications Cloud administrative interface. For the user name, be sure to use a dedicated web services email address. Minimal access is best--if you don't need to make account-level changes, assign the web services topic administrator role. Contact GD if you'd like guidance on permission levels to grant.

Get Connected

To develop against our API, you'll need a server. Our API is a web service, which means that you will also need to connect to it over the Internet. If you have a proxy set up on your development machine, you will need a way to get around it.

Review Our Best Practices

• Build and test in the stage environment, then move to production.
• Use a generic email address for testing.
• Have a proper retry method to catch any errors.
• Run the resources from a database, and not the webpage - use a queuing service to queue calls.

Know REST

Our API is based on Representational State Transfer (REST). REST APIs provide access to resources (data entities) via URI paths. Resources available through this API include things like bulletins, categories, or subscribers. REST APIs operate over HTTP(S) making it easy to use with any programming language or framework. To use a REST API, your application will make a request using standard HTTP methods. For example, send a GET to a resource to see a list of the available entities.

Review the principles of REST before you begin. You can find a good primer here.

You can use RESTClient (for Firefox) or Postman (for Chrome) to test out the methods for this API (use the stage base URL).

What's Next?

• Getting Started
• Base URLs
• Authentication

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