The benefits of the internet have reached into nearly every sector of our society. Business productivity has risen dramatically, and individuals have been empowered in ways that few had imagined. These new capacities hold great promise for civic participation in our democracy. Geographically disparate groups can rapidly coalesce around niche issues, and using low cost technologies, grass roots organizations can make a substantial impact on federal legislation.
Increased communications capacities made possible by the internet have simultaneously placed tremendous burdens on Congressional offices. A solution must be found to encourage civic participation without overburdening Congressional offices.
Just as the development of well-developed standards is frequently mentioned as a key to the successful growth of the internet, I believe that the adoption of a standardized format for constituent correspondence promises significant benefits for Congressional offices, advocacy organizations, mail campaign vendors, and, most importantly, for the American public.
As earlier speakers have noted, the state of constituent correspondence remains highly problematic. The flood of advocacy emails is deluging Congressional offices, and we are struggling to keep up. We constantly live with the concern that overwhelming mailing campaigns could make us miss critical emails, such as a request for help from someone serving on the front lines in Iraq.
Because a standardized data format does not exist for constituent correspondence, advocacy campaign form letters go into the same inbox as comments initiated by individuals. Offices use increasingly advanced technology to manage this correspondence, but Congressional offices report intense frustration and a growing tendency to regard advocacy campaigns as spam. Congressional offices highly value the input of constituents, but offices report feeling overwhelmed by the current system of constituent correspondence.
One of the key metrics of success for many advocacy campaigns is the quantity of emails sent to congressional offices, which also correlates with the degree people feel a part of an organization and subsequently donate to the organization. As such, we can expect the quantity of correspondence to continue the trend of exponential increase.
Many of my colleagues have expressed great concerns over the state of constituent mail, with some offices going so far as to enact systems to block all automated correspondence that originates from advocacy organizations campaigns. These systems, like the logic puzzle, were overcome by the large advocacy system vendors within days. Instead of engaging in continuously escalating warfare, I am pleased that the stakeholders are here today looking for a mutually beneficial solution.
Stakeholders should jointly develop a structured data format for corresponding with congress. While there would be increased technical demands placed upon advocacy organizations, I believe that the benefits for all parties would greatly outweigh the costs of adoption of a standardized system. Most congressional offices are already using constituent correspondence systems which utilize XML, so incorporating additional fields would be a manageable addition.
The correspondence could include fields for the name and contact information for the advocacy organization and mass mail vendor, allowing offices to communicate with those organizations if there are technical or content errors in the emails being sent to Congress. Trivial formatting issues (such as whether a prefix is included for names) can cause our correspondence systems to automatically disregard correspondence, so having a way to contact the vendors to let them know about formatting issues would be valuable.
In addition, providing offices with this information would allow us to more easily tabulate the number of constituents who are members of that group.
At the moment, all email correspondence typically goes a single mail depository system and then staff must run algorithms to find nearly identical emails, which we then interpret as identical correspondence. We don’t have the time to find the individual comments within each email, so the customized individual comments that constituents enter are typically not noticed.
A section for individual comments in the email would allow these highly desirable individual comments on legislation to reach offices. This would also allow offices to quickly peruse constituent’s comments on a specific bill or issue which they are evaluating.
Brevity should be strongly encouraged. Staff time is highly limited and lengthier comments will reduce the degree to which comments are read. Constituents should be encourage to conduct more extensive conversations on the phone.
Indicating the legislation being commented upon (if any) would have several benefits, including allowing staff to quickly look up constituent’s individualized comments on a bill and allow for advanced reporting functionality. At the moment, House Resolution 123 might be listed as “HRES123” in one email, “H. Res.123” in another, and “House Res. 123” in a third. As a result, a single search doesn’t find all of the bills, so we don’t have an effective way of finding constituent comments about a particular bill. This is another area where standardization would be useful.
Issue tagging (i.e. health or foreign relations) would also be useful for reporting and automatically routing letters to staffers who handle a particular issue. This could also allow for customized mail reports based on the issues that staffers handle.
This is complicated by the fact that different offices use different issue categorizing schemes, and different aspects of an issues may be handled by different staffers. The Congressional Research Service’s Legislative Indexing Vocabulary (LIV) may be the most effective (and standardized) taxonomy for this purpose. A system could be developed in which offices had the ability to map out which LIV term corresponded to their own particular system and which staffer(s) handled each.
A brief label for the campaign which could be listed in reports.
When relevant, organizations could indicate whether their campaign is in support of, or opposing the bill or issue. Today, because of time constraints, offices will draft a single email to those who support and oppose a bill. As such, there is sometimes no tracking of the sentiment of a controversial issue other than the total quantity of constituents who wrote in both in favor and against the issue.
Constituent contact info
Congressional offices would appreciate gaining as much information about constituents as possible. Advocacy groups (and constituents) are likely more hesitant about providing that information to congressional offices. Address is required so we can confirm that they are in our Congressional District (although we sometimes receive mail from people who pretend to be from our district). It remains a question whether constituents should be required to include their phone number and email address in their correspondence.
Enewsletter signup
Congressional offices are constantly looking for ways to more effectively reach their constituency. We would greatly appreciate if advocacy organizations allowed constituents to sign up for our Enewsletters though their contact your member form.
Being able to ensure that only constituents are communicating with their Member of Congress is a requirement frequently cited by Congressional offices.
On the other hand, constituents have requested the ability to be able to communicate with other members who stand on committees that will be addressing issues that are important to them and that their representative may have less impact on.
Accurate Tabulation: Offices, in greater numbers, are beginning to respond to some advocacy mail campaigns with simple “Thank you for contacting my office” form letters. Since offices typically tally the number of constituents advocating a position by counting how many times each form letter was sent out per week, the sentiments expressed through mass mail campaigns are increasingly undercounted. The more precise tabulation which could be developed with a structured data format would allow for the voice of advocacy groups to be heard more clearly.
Increasing Influence and Dialogue: Offices would see how much sway organizations had by their number of members contacting the office from their District. They could also easily contact organizations if they had additional questions about the advocacy group’s position on the issue or preemptively reach out to the organization before an upcoming key vote.
Better Representation: Constituents would be empowered by their Representative being better able to view their comments on specific legislation and issues. High priority messages could also receive quicker attention. Offices may, however, want to steer time sensitive communications to telephone communications.
Time & Reports: The greatest benefits of this system go to congressional offices. Large amounts of staff resources could be conserved and used for more constituent responses and other legislative duties. In addition, being able to easily view constituent comments on a particular bill (and view charts of district sentiment) would be incredibly valuable to offices.
Email System Relief: Allowing communications reception that does not impact our email servers would be beneficial for relieving our inundated House servers.
Certification: To increase participation in this program (and address potential spamming issues) perhaps a certification process should be developed. Vendors who received certification in this program could advertise that they are “certified”. This is a complex issue which requires substantial thought before potential implementation.
Reception Assurance: Certified vendors could receive a guarantee that their email is being received by congressional offices. Offices might not actually view the advocacy campaign correspondence, but it would be available to congressional offices in an easily accessible system while unstructured mass mail campaigns might not make it to offices.
Avoiding Spam Designation: Once this system was in use offices would increasingly view large mass mail campaigns using unstructured data as spam and increasingly ignore them. As momentum developed, all large organizations would begin using structure data formats. We would need to develop a way to easily allow smaller advocacy groups to also utilize the enhanced correspondence format.
Smaller Organization Participation: Sending the correspondence in a structured data format could be cost-prohibitive for smaller organizations. These smaller organizations, which might typically send out a mass email and simply suggest that their members email their member of Congress. Solutions should be found to allow smaller advocacy organizations the option of participating in this system even if they don’t have the funds to pay for advocacy campaign software.
Government is typically slow to adapt to change, and even more so for Congress. The ideas contained in this document are mere seeds for further discussion. Implementing substantial changes to the status quo, however, will require determination and sustained collaboration between all parties. While difficult, improvements are critical to constituents being able to communicate effectively with their representatives. Our job, while daunting, is a needed step in the evolution of our democratic system.
The leadership shown by CMF, and the coalition they have fostered, leads me to believe that our goals are achievable. Our next step, I believe, is to continue the dialogue started here to develop a system which serves the needs of all stakeholders, and most importantly, the American people.
Rob Pierson
President
House Systems Administrators Association