Dr. DigiPol

There are two events in the next couple weeks addressing how Congress communicates with constituents. Today, the Internet Advocacy Roundtable, which is now a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, is featuring staffers from several House and Senate offices along with a leading CRM expert to discuss innovations Congress is implementing to deepen relations with constituents.

On October 1, the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) is hosting its Communicating with Congress Conference in DC. I am speaking on the second panel of this conference, discussing the scope of the problems faced by Congress, advocacy groups, software vendors, and citizens in dealing with “petitioning the government with grievances.” (For more information on this conference, contact Tim Hysom

What follows is the written testimony for my CMF presentation:

Of Problems, Obligations, and Opportunities

When the Congressional Management Foundation released its findings that 75% of congressional staffers thought that the form emails they received from constituents were either fake (50%) or not sure if they were real (25%), I immediately contacted MoveOn.org and suggested that they launch a campaign to get their millions of members to send emails to Congress saying their form emails were authentic. I thought such an outpouring would put to rest any doubts. I got no response.

About six months later, I approached Care2 with the same proposition. Instead of taking my suggested blunt course of action, I arranged a meeting between Care2 and CMF. This meeting was one of the early seeds that resulted in two coalitions to address the issue, one comprising vendor and the other advocacy organizations. In the year and a half since, there have been meetings between the coalitions and representatives from Congress, but it is unclear if much has changed.

From the perspective of Congress, the email explosion is a problem. Office staff and technology budgets have not increased in twenty years, while communication from constituents, especially driven by email, has more than quadrupled. Clearly this is a capacity issue. But it is also a political issue.

The prevailing political environment in the nation frowns heavily whenever Congress gives itself a pay raise. The problem is that Member salaries are lumped together with administrative budgets in the eyes of the public. The citizenry rarely understand that congressional staff is notoriously underpaid and that the technology in these offices are rarely up to date. Until such time that administrative budgets are uncoupled from Member salaries, this political barrier will remain an issue.

From the perspective of advocacy groups, organizing citizens into memberships that write to Congress to promote their shared policy goals is crucial to their missions. And while it would be great if the groups could rely on their activists to stay on message when writing to Congress, they feel they do not have that luxury. Senators and Representatives respond with their votes to constituents when constituents are specific regarding bill numbers. And they are responsive to well reasoned arguments, at least in principle. So advocacy groups feel compelled to write the letters to Congress for their activists in order to ensure they communications stay “on message.”

Now, rarely do advocacy groups lock down the letter text. Activists are almost always free to edit the letters and put them in their own words. But many do not, either because they do not have time, do not feel confident, do not know they have the option, do not want to, or feel that the letter as written is perfectly suited to the task. Regardless of the reasons, few will personalize. And fewer still will change the subject line of the email (which often gives the appearance that they have not edited the letter if staffers do not open the email).

From the advocacy software vendors’ perspective, providing tools to advocacy groups that allow them to take a proactive role in crafting the messages its members send to Congress is their bread and butter. It is this administrative control that helps vendors sell their products to advocacy groups (along with the integration of a constituent relations management database). The harder Congress makes it for advocacy groups to use this software, the less reason they have to buy it in the first place.

From a citizen’s perspective, this whole affair is insulting. After all, the First Amendment guarantees each of us the right “to petition the Government for redress of grievances.” This right does not limit the channels of communication. Yet Congress seems to be doing just that when they impose logic puzzles, which require math literacy, on citizens; when they block email from the IP addresses of advocacy software vendors; or when they “select all and delete” messages with the same subject line.

Citizens have the unlimited right to communicate with their elected representatives. And they have the right to rely on advocacy organizations to track legislation for them, provide research to them, and write text for them to send to Congress. After all, every Member of Congress has a staff that tracks legislation, does research, and writes text for both the bills and the emails sent back to constituents. What is good for the goose must be good for the gander, especially if we believe in due process under the law.

Back to My Personal Journey
Continuing my personal story as I reacted to CMF’s study, after meeting with Care2 and CMF, I sent an email to my Senator at the time, George Allen. I explained to him that I have often sent emails to him, Senator Warner, and Congressman Moran. Sometimes I put the emails in my own words, I explained, but other times I forwarded a form letter. I assured him that all these emails were, indeed, from me. I further explained that I always got a reply from Representative Moran, usually from Senator Warner, but NEVER from Senator Allen.

Within an hour I received a detailed email apologizing and responding to a few of the issues I mentioned in my email. Clearly I had struck a nerve. But as amazing as this response was, I was hardly prepared to find when I arrived at home later that evening a voice message from the Senator’s office.

It seems they had three different email addresses from me and would I please call them to reconcile their records. Now, I have more than three email addresses and they all work. And if they were trying to tell me that this was the reason they never replied to me, then they were offering a very poor excuse. Nothing stopped them from hitting reply to any of my emails. And all three emails were tied to the same street address if they wanted send me a letter by post.

Opportunities
Perhaps the biggest problem in this morass is that Congress, more often than not, seeks to manage their communications with constituents, often at arms’ length. But email offers an enormous opportunity to deepen relations with constituents. Emails coming in to Congress contain not only digitized contact data for constituents, ready to import into their contact database, but also in depth information about what issues they care about, and in the case of form emails, what organizations they belong to. This is a gold mine of information that can help Members of Congress not only create deeper relations with constituents, but also help them better represent their interests. It is very sad that this golden opportunity often is seen as a problem.