CapWiz Plays Rough -- and Wrong -- on Congressional Delivery
01:30 PM Oct 02, 2006
In this morning's Washington Post, Jeffrey Birnbaum's K Street Confidential column (free registration/bugmenot
needed) reports the allegation by Capitol Advantage (aka CapWiz) that
competing vendors -- including DemocracyInAction, which is dignified
specifically with a charge of "fail[ing] miserably" -- are to various
degrees not delivering messages to Congress through write-your-rep web
pages.
At least as pertains DemocracyInAction, they're talking through their hats.
Here's the short reason, before we get into the weeds: the study's
methodology was to assess deliverability by testing
different vendors' web forms with constituent messages to members who
are known to send replies, and seeing whether the sender in fact
received such a reply. On the face of it, not an unreasonable way to do
it. But our software has long passed to congressional web forms
addresses that pipe replies back to our own network as opposed to the
sender's actual e-mail, so that the entire experience is a clean
one-and-done for someone clicking a campaign page.
GWU professor Dr. Dennis Johnson, credited with overseeing the study,
apparently never thought to question his process before arriving at the
most bombastic conclusion possible, which conclusion also just happened
to inure to the financial benefit of the sponsoring entity. As of this
writing, Capitol Advantage's website baldly displays its false "0%
delivery rate" for DemocracyInAction. Now that they know it's wrong,
we'll see if they choose to back off it. Update: Credit where due; Capitol Advantage's graphic now reflects this response. (Incidentally, welcome to folks referred from Capitol Advantage's study -- and thanks to Cap Ad for linking to our critical response.)
But even more than
being wrong on the facts, it's wrong on the narrative -- that
congressional deliverability problems are caused by bad vendors rather
than the intended consequence of a backwards electronic communications
regime erected (and vigorously reinforced) by congressional offices.
Some background is in order here, and readers familiar with the
whole congressional deliverability terrain can feel free to skip these
next two paragraphs.
Capitol Advantage is the granddaddy of
messaging Congress online. In fact, its roots as a company are
pre-Internet altogether: its printed directories of legislative aides
are still used in the Hill. Capitol Advantage recognized, however, that
this store of data could open up a whole new revenue stream from
advocacy organizations, and the write-your-rep page was born. That tool
subsequently met sincere flattery from a host of other companies who
have extended the concept by incorporating it into constituent
relationship management platforms which use online actions to recruit
supporters, database features to manage those supporters, and e-mail
blasters to maintain communication with them. DemocracyInAction's
software is a species in this genus.
Congress, meanwhile,
responded to the explosion in online communications spurred by said
model's proliferation not by engineering new ways to manage enormous
quantities of inputs but by squeezing off access to keep the flow
manageable -- specifically, by withdrawing public e-mail addresses and
erecting web forms designed to obstruct organized e-mail campaigns
originating from third-party sites. Which brings us to the current counterproductive stalemate
in which legislators churn unnecessary changes through web forms in an
effort to trip up a couple dozen vendors and independents, who in turn
monitor 500+ web forms for these selfsame changes. On the plus side, it
generates plenty of employment -- long a strength of the lobbying
industry.
(Welcome back to the paragraph-skippers.)
Everyone respects what CapWiz has done, and not least because the Congress.org
site it endowed is also a genuine public benefit. But this report
grossly overclaims its conclusions, and the fact that registering a
zero didn't set off enough alarm bells to ask us about it underscores
its role as a marketing hit rather than pursuit of truth.
Perhaps
the company's heavy investment in surmounting unnecessary and
undemocratic obstacles where others have extended their platforms'
feature sets amounts to an investment in the status quo. Implicit in
this report is
the idea that the decision by elected officials to refuse
delivery of citizen communiques is not a public wrong to be righted
but a corporate profit center, and at rates that would lock most small
organizations completely out of the conversation.
Birnbaum doesn't cite our specific response because it's not a
CapWiz vs. DIA issue from the commanding heights (the report looks at
10 different vendors) -- and to his credit, he nails the real problem
around which Capitol Advantage circumlocutes. Reflecting on low
delivery rates, he recognizes the other party in the transaction:
"That is a big disappointment. After all, aren't public officials
supposed to be open to the public?"
...
and then proceeds to discuss the implications of the recipients'
overall readiness to dismiss e-mail communiques whether they receive
them or no.
"That strikes me as the bigger issue: Not whether every e-mail is
getting through to Congress but how many of them are being read with
serious interest. I bet a closer look at that issue would be even more
unsettling to Web site operators and their clients than the latest
estimate of delivery rates."
Hear, hear. Birnbaum fleshes out his take a bit more in an online chat currently ongoing as this post goes up.
For anyone interested, the below is the reply we sent Birnbaum last week during his research of the story.
Our software is set to to direct replies back to our own system by
passing anonymized e-mail addresses through the web forms, so their
methodology would never register hits for us. It's been that way for
some time. Had this been a study meant to advance understanding as
opposed to a commercial hit piece, they might have easily learned that
by asking us. For that matter, it's amazing that seeing two companies
come up with zero percent didn't cause them to question their own
methodology, and it's breathtakingly cavalier for them to assert on this
narrow basis that we "failed miserably in [our] ability to send e-mails
to Congress." Were we to level this charge against Capitol Advantage,
we'd hear from their attorneys.
The larger issue, as you're aware, is the overall congressional
deliverability environment. This study unfortunately distorts a grave
issue of democratic participation in and access to the political process
through the lens of one company's marketing department. Every one of
these vendors and thousands of advocacy organizations using them or
going it alone are operating in an environment that's fundamentally
shaped by congressional hostility to online advocacy. The CMF report
addresses this problem directly -- that it's a deluge of communications,
staff size hasn't increased in a quarter-century, and most offices
aren't sure what to do. It ends up less like delivering postcards to a
mailbox and more like serving a subpoena to a fugitive: the recipient
is actively avoiding the message, and is likely to ignore it once it
gets there. The whole purpose of web forms is to make it *harder* to
write. So Capitol Advantage uses a deeply flawed methodology to prove a
deeply flawed point -- that ultimately it's the people trying to reach
Congress through the Internet who are at fault for members' decisions to
create obstacles to online communications in lieu of developing new ways
to handle them.
While we provide a tool for communicating with Capitol Hill, we're a
nonprofit organization ourselves -- I believe the only such entity in
the survey pool -- and as such, we're concerned about access. Small
organizations shouldn't need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to
generate organized e-mails to Congress, and people who want to take
action shouldn't have to navigate confusing welters of web forms. If
Capitol Advantage really shared that concern, they'd be more interested
in moving the Hill towards better standards of practice. This report
suggests Capitol Advantage thinks systematic dysfunction is not so much
bad for democracy as good for sales.
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