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Cutting through the noise on Capitol Hill |
The Congressional Management Foundation has put out a report on how to improve the state of affairs for communicating electronically with Congress. The report was released on December 8, 2008 (with an interim report published earlier this year in July). I think that everyone who is doing grassroots and online advocacy campaigns should read the full report, so download it today.
Here are some of the take-aways I thought were most notable - some of which reinforce already accepted best practices, and one that was new to me:
Citizens should:
- contact your Member of Congress once per issue unless you have new information to provide
- be courteous even if you disagree with your Member's position on the issue
- clearly state your position
- tell a personal story about how the issue affects you
Organizations should:
- be specific in the sample letter about the bill number and the position your organization is taking (pro or con)
- use constituent matching (this is a big one - make sure your members are communicating to their Representative or Senators only)
- make it clear to your members to whom their letter is being sent
- identify the organization behind the grassroots campaign
The "identify the organization behind the grassroots campaign" recommendation made me sit up and take notice. I used to think it was better NOT to identify the organization, and instead to spend a lot of time and effort making it seem like the letter from the constituent had no connection to an organization at all. We used various techniques like rotating subject lines for the letter to Congress, rotating a carousel of letters, and not naming our organization in the text of the letter.
Turns out that's not necessarily a good investment of time. Hill staffers prefer to know which organization is facilitating the communication, as well as an easy way to categorize the organization's and constituents' position on the issue or bill. And I can't say I blame them, knowing that the volume of messages they receive and must reply to is growing every year. (I'm not done with my Christmas cards yet, and it's going to be a race to the finish line this year, so I really feel for them.)
The report also calls for a new model of constituent correspondence management on the Hill. It refers to an aggregated communications dashboard, essentially a tool for managing the volume of incoming corresponence while preserving the ability to read and respond individually to messages. This dashboard would summarize such pertinent data as the issue/bill number, the issue position of the organization (support/oppose with comments) and the constituent comments. CMF's study also recommends identifying the vendor as well as the organization so there is a contact in case technical issues are identified.
In addition to easing the burden of managing constituent correspondence, there's another potential benefit for Congress. Over time, this system would essentially be compiling database of the "poli-fluentials" in a Member's district. See pages 15-16 of the report - poli-fluentials are people who participate in online advocacy, and are 7 times more likely to be "influentials" in their social networks. (If you attended the "Social Media for Social Good" webinar yesterday, you probably learned about influentials and social networks.) There's a lot more to say about poli-fluentials than I can fit in here - maybe a topic for another day.
Anyway, I thought it would be fun to look up some of the older advocacy campaigns that I worked on, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that for the most part, the campaigns I put out in 2001-2006 followed almost all of these best practices (except for the "identify the organization" one). I'm sure some of my lobbyist colleagues had a lot to do with keeping our letters clear and concise, since most of them had been around the congressional block as legislative correspondents or assistants. So thanks, guys!
Anyway - the 111th Congress is just around the corner, so if you haven't read this study, get it today and spend some quality time with it over the holidays.
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Convio will continue to be involved in implementing the CMF recommendations, including assisting with the development of a new standardized communications protocol for use with Hill offices. We have already completed work within our product to support posting "topic codes" to Hill webforms to make it easy for offices to manage constitutent correspondence. One of the big challenges now is identifying a few Hill offices (and their correspondence management vendors) to beta test some of the new ideas. Contact Bill Pease, who leads our participation in the CMF process, for further information.
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Thanks for this post, Sally. The report’s recommendations make a lot of sense, sound like they would greatly improve communications between citizens and the Hill, and should be implemented quickly. However, putting the recommendations in place will involve some key changes on the part of advocacy organizations, advocacy vendors (like Convio), congressional offices, and the vendors that serve Congress. And unless all the parties agree on a complementary new approach (the “dashboard”), no one party will want to invest in the changes. The Congressional Management Foundation calls for the creation of an implementation task force, says it has identified key participants, and offers to convene an initial organizing meeting. Will Convio be part of the task force? Do you have any other information you can share about followup?
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Hey Heather - thanks! The CMF report was pretty interesting and readable, so it was easy to distill. Convio was one of the organizations who worked with CMF on this study, so I think it's safe to say that we'll be on board for supporting changes that will improve the communications between citizens and the Hill. What's key is adoption of this dashboard, I think, to ensure that changes vendors make can be consumed by congressional offices.
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Great post, Sally. Your point about letting the representative know what organization the communication is coming from echoes points made by Chris Burley of Defenders of Wildlife at the Convio Summit this year. I thought this was a great, fresh approach - transparent and honest like we are hoping our new administration will be!
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Thanks for distilling that information, Sally -- it's really helpful, rather than having to wade through the CMF report itself. I think that Knowledge As Power in Washington State is working on the kind of dashboard that's referenced in the report -- I hope that Sarah Schact and the KAP folks are listening (and have Google Alerts set up!). It seems like Hill staffers usually receive constituent emails either too far on one end (printing out each email and treating it as a letter) or on the other end (treat every email about a subject as one cumulative letter). It would be great to solve that problem as we move into the 111th Congress. Out of curiosity, what's Convio's plan for responding to the report?