So, What Does Congress Do With All Those E-Mails?

10:00 AM Aug 12, 2005

This post is a bit of a catch-up; a couple of weeks before we launched this blog, the Congressional Management Foundation released a report about how Congress is handling the flood of citizen e-mail.

As we've known for a while, they're struggling.

I did my time in the Capitol Hill intern factory in the mid 90's. The communication was pretty much all of the traditional variety, but here's how we handled it:

• Mail and faxes went to a back room, where a recluse spent the entire day shuffling it into various subject cubbies ("Defense," "Environment," etc.), which then went to the staffers covering that area. These in turn parsed them however they liked to get a feel for the issue, and had their interns generate the tedious blow-off replies you get when you write to Congress.
• Phone calls relating to upcoming votes generated a tally. We rotated duties and just put a mark on a sheet: Fer it or agin it. We all indulged the temptation to cook those tallies now and again. At the end of the day, we'd pass on the sheets of tally marks.
  

Every office is a little different, but this is not the sort of institutional agility that was going to make a rapid adaptation to a medium allowing thousands of instant communications. Nowadays, your best case scenario for an Internet campaign is that it's handled like those phone calls and tallied, or at least approximated.

In practice, it's often going straight to the trash.

Congressional offices are all but helpless to handle the communications; often, they respond by complicating the web form they use for constituent comments in an effort to stanch the tide ... which in turn forces organizations like ours to reprogram the data warehouse to force the same information through the new web form, in order to allow thousands of messages to be deliverd to staffers whose fondest wish is to ignore them. It oozes inefficiency at every joint.

There's a lot to discuss here, and we'll revisit some of themes in this report in the future. Fundamentally, it's clear that the space urgently needs to evolve communications standards that would increase the transparency and usefulness of congressional advocacy campaigns (which certainly aren't going away) for both the interest groups that run them and the offices that they target.

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