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    Communicatingwith Congress

    Recommendations for Improvingthe Democratic Dialogue

    This report was made possible by grants from

    The Communicating with CongressWorking Group:

    Amplify Public Affairs, Capitol Advantage, Convio, Democracy Data & Communications,Grassroots Enterprise, Vocus, and voterVOICE

    and

    AARP, Adfero Group, Lockheed Martin Corporation,National Write Your Congressman, and Pitney Bowes

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    The draft report of Communicating withCongress: Recommendations to Improvethe Democratic Dialogue, is being offeredfor public comment.

    The contents of this report are the views ofthe Congressional Management Foundationand are based on years of extensiveresearch conducted with multiplestakeholder groups.

    All content herein, includingrecommendations, is tentative pending theparticipation and feedback from allstakeholders.

    No part of this draft may be published or

    reproduced in any manner without thewritten permission of the CongressionalManagement Foundation. For purposes ofpublic comment, this draft may be forwardedand shared with any interested party.

    To share your perspective and help shapethe final version of this report, please takethe 10-minute feedback survey at:https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Hn76eYOfbUe_2bWM9r9gSdlw_3d_3dor submit any white papers or additionalcomments to [email protected].

    The public comment period will be open untilJuly 18, 2008, when CMF will incorporatewhat we learn into the culminating report ofthe multi-year Communicating withCongressproject.

    2008 Congressional ManagementFoundation

    513 Capitol Court, NESuite 300Washington, DC 20002202-546-0100www.cmfweb.org

    https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Hn76eYOfbUe_2bWM9r9gSdlw_3d_3dhttps://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Hn76eYOfbUe_2bWM9r9gSdlw_3d_3dmailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Hn76eYOfbUe_2bWM9r9gSdlw_3d_3dhttps://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Hn76eYOfbUe_2bWM9r9gSdlw_3d_3d
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    About the Communicating with CongressProject

    For nearly a decade, the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) has been working to improvecommunications between citizens and Members of Congress. We have found that the Internet has made iteasier and cheaper to contact Congress than ever before. However, technological developments have

    been so rapid that neither citizens and the organizers of grassroots advocacy campaigns (the senders) norcongressional offices (the receivers) have learned to use it in ways that facilitate truly effectivecommunications between citizens and Members of Congress. As a result, while more messages are beingsent to Congress, it seems that less actual communication is occurring.

    To help improve the communications, CMF has undertaken a project to: identify the perceptions,expectations, and practices of both sides of congressional communications; provide information to educateand guide congressional offices, citizens, and the grassroots community; promote changes in the attitudesand practices of both sides; and facilitate collaboration and information-sharing that will result in moremeaningful and manageable dialogue.

    To accomplish these objectives, CMF has conducted extensive research and engaged an ever-wideningcircle of stakeholders. We began our research with congressional offices, and our outreach resulted in the

    2005 report entitled Communicating with Congress: How Capitol Hill is Coping with the Surge in CitizenAdvocacy. We then engaged small groups of targeted stakeholders in congressional communications,including thought leaders and technologists both on and off Capitol Hill. These meetings led to theCommunicating with Congressconference in the fall of 2007, where more than 200 stakeholder participantsfrom both sides engaged in discussions about current processes and problems with communicationsbetween citizens and Members of Congress, as well as possible solutions. In June 2008, CMF released areport on our national survey of adult Americans regarding their interactions with Members of Congress.That report, entitled Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement,discusses what motivates citizens to communicate, how satisfied they are with their interactions withMembers, and the impact that the Internet has had on congressional communications.

    Through all of this previous research and the release for public comment of this draft report we expand ourresearch and outreach to the public and invite the public to participate in discussion of our concept of, andrecommendations for, improved communications.

    We have gained insight through survey research, outreach, and dialogue with as many of the interestedparties as possible. This has enabled us to incorporate a broad, inclusive perspective into our work. Wehope this collaborative approach will result in a new model for communications between constituents andtheir elected officials which will have the support and commitment of as many people as possible. It is ourgoal that the model we propose will, if implemented, reduce or remove the current frustrations and barriers,facilitate increased citizen participation in the public policy process, and promote a meaningful democraticdialogue that benefits our country.

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    Acknowledgements

    Neither this report the culminating report of the Communicating with Congressproject nor any otheraspect of this endeavor would have been possible without the input, guidance, expertise, and dedication ofa great many people. CMF is grateful to every individual who contributed their knowledge and enthusiasmtoward the noble goal of improving communications between citizens and the Members of Congress whorepresent them.

    Of course, with a large number of contributors come an endless number of perspectives and opinions. Forthat reason, while we extend our gratitude to the following individuals and organizations, their inclusiondoes not necessarily imply an endorsement or affirmation of the ideas and concepts in this report.

    We are indebted to those who have generously supported this important work without their contributions,this project would not have been possible. We thank the Communicating with CongressWorking Group, acoalition of grassroots advocacy vendors, who have not only financially supported this work, but have alsoprovided a critical perspective on communications to Capitol Hill. The Working Groups members includeAmplify Public Affairs, Capitol Advantage, Convio, Democracy Data & Communications, GrassrootsEnterprise, Vocus, and voterVOICE, and we appreciate their generous support and guidance. We would

    also like to thank AARP, Adfero Group, Lockheed Martin Corporation, National Write Your Congressman,and Pitney Bowes for their generous sponsorship and belief in the aims of the project.

    This report, and indeed the entire project, benefited from important contributions from CMF staff whoinvested time and creativity at various stages. Their ideas and support are reflected on every page. I wouldparticularly like to thank Kathy Goldschmidt for her vast historical perspective and for her insightful offeringsand observations. Nicole Folk Cooper and Collin Burden have been invaluable assets in the planning,crafting, editing, and production of this report and the final product is greatly improved because of theirguidance and input. I would also like to thank Beverly Bell and Leslie Ochreiter for lending their extensiveinsight and observations and to CMF interns Gretchen Hahn, Laura Harrington, Jared Malin, and LauraMinicucci for their assistance.

    The origins of this report and project reach back almost ten years, and for this reason we must also extend

    our thanks to a number of former CMF staff. We would like to thank Brad Fitch for his tireless commitmentto this project and Rick Shapiro for his leadership and strategic guidance while he served as CMFsExecutive Director. We are also owe our gratitude to Nicole Griffin and Ellen Fulton who were bothintimately involved in the research and thinking in the early stages of this project.

    CMF is also indebted to the many congressional staff in the House and Senate who patiently shared theirwisdom and knowledge. Their candor and dedication to public service are what originally motivated CMF tohelp identify a better system for citizens to communicate with Members of Congress. They patientlyanswered our questions, sacrificed their time, and shared the rewards and challenges they encounter intheir work. We would like to particularly thank Lynden Armstrong, Senate Committee on Rules andAdministration; Judson Blewett, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX); John Clocker, House Information Resources;Dan Doody, Office of the Chief Administrative Officer; Steve Dwyer, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD); Tina Hanonu, House Information Resources; Alec Hoppes, Committee on House Administration; EdJankus, Office of the Senate Sergeant at Arms; Kevin Kearns, Office of the Senate Sergeant at Arms; MikeKuhl, Senate Committee on Rules and Administration; Tom Meenan, Office of the Senate Sergeant atArms; Michael Modica, House Information Resources; Damon Nelson, Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA);Karina Newton, Office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA); Matt Payne-Funk, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT);Nick Schaper, House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH); Sterling Spriggs, Committee on HouseAdministration; Moon Sulfab, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY); Bill Sweeney, SenatorDebbie Stabenow (D-MI); Tracy Williams, Office of the Senate Sergeant at Arms; and Kim Winn, Office ofthe Senate Sergeant at Arms.

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    DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENTOne congressional staffer, however, deserves our special recognition for his dedication to not only thisproject, but also for his work on helping to identify the new model for constituent communications containedin these pages. Rob Pierson, in the office of Congressman Mike Honda (D-CA) and former president of theHouse Systems Administrators Association, has provided tenacious leadership and has been a force forinnovation and the advancement of technology in the House of Representatives.

    We must also thank Daniel Bennett, coauthor of The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy is Changing thePolitical Landscape, former congressional staffer, and former president of the House SystemsAdministrators Association, for lending his vast knowledge of both Congress and technology to theCommunicating with Congressproject. Daniel was the first to identify the need to introduce a uniqueidentifier within grassroots advocacy campaigns in order for them to be more easily aggregated andadministered. The concept for a new model of constituent communications discussed in this report reliesheavily on his past thinking and efforts in this area. CMF is grateful for his foresight and efforts to solve thisproblem before many people understood there to be a problem.

    There are also a number of individuals who offered their time and expert insights to this project. We want tothank Doug Pinkham of the Public Affairs Council; Larry Bradley, formerly of Gartner Consulting; AlanRosenblatt from the Center for American Progress Action Fund; John Wonderlich of the SunlightFoundation; Grace Markarian of The Humane Society of the United States; Chris Burley of Defenders ofWildlife; and Kathy Mitchell of Consumers Union for their contributions.

    We would also like to thank all of the congressional CMS/CSS vendors for their input and perspective onhow to solve the communications challenges of their House and Senate clients. Centurum,ComputerWorks, Confluent, InterAmerica, Lockheed Martin Desktop Solutions, Inc., and Monarch haveparticipated in this project to some degree, and their insight has been invaluable.

    Finally, we wish to thank everyone who contributed to this project through their participation in the countlessinterviews, focus groups, stakeholder meetings, and attendance at the fall 2007 Communicating withCongressconference. The success of this report is due in large part to the participation, dedication, andgenerosity of the numerous individuals and organizations that have assembled around this effort to improvethe democratic dialogue.

    Tim HysomCongressional Management Foundation

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    Table of Contents

    Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 1Key Stakeholders to Congressional Communications.............................................................................. 3

    Citizens ........................................................................................................................................................ 3Organizers of Grassroots Advocacy Campaigns......................................................................................... 5Vendors that Provide Tools to Facilitate Grassroots Advocacy Campaigns ............................................... 6House and Senate Member Offices ............................................................................................................ 7Congressional Committee and Leadership Offices ..................................................................................... 7House and Senate Institutional Support Offices.......................................................................................... 8Vendors that Provide Tools to Manage Congressional Communications ................................................... 8

    Communications Process Overview..........................................................................................................10Constituent Action...................................................................................................................................... 10Congressional Office Action ...................................................................................................................... 11The Arms Race..........................................................................................................................................14

    Current Communications Challenges........................................................................................................ 17A New Model for Constituent Communications........................................................................................ 21

    Origins of the New Model .......................................................................................................................... 21The Key Principles..................................................................................................................................... 21The Concept: A Dual-Channel Dashboard............................................................................................... 23Implementing the Dual-Channel Dashboard Model................................................................................... 30

    Stakeholder Recommendations ................................................................................................................. 32The Institution of Congress........................................................................................................................ 32Recommendations for Member Offices ..................................................................................................... 33Recommendations for Committee and Leadership Offices....................................................................... 39Recommendations for Citizens.................................................................................................................. 42Recommendations for Organizers of Grassroots Advocacy Campaigns .................................................. 45

    Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................... 51About CMF.................................................................................................................................................... 52

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    Introduction

    Communications between citizens and Members of Congress are in peril. At a time when the Internet hasmade it easier than ever before for Americans to engage in public policy, it is easy to assume that the

    quality of communications between the representative and the represented has improved. In fact, theopposite is true. A series of issues have converged in a perfect storm of increased mail volumes, aproliferation of grassroots advocacy campaigns, an increased U.S. population, static congressional staffresources, and inadequate and under-utilized technology tools. The result has been a breakdown inmeaningful communications. If something is not done, citizens will grow more disillusioned withgovernment, elected leaders will become more removed from those they represent, and the ultimate victimwill be the open and honest dialogue between citizens and Members of Congress.

    As the population of the United States has increased, so have the number of communications sent toCongress each year. In 1911 the year the number of representatives in the House was set at 435 districts averaged around 75,000 people. Today the average congressional district has grown to 650,000.In fact, since the 1970s, the last time congressional staff sizes changed appreciably, the United Statespopulation has grown by more than 100 million people, and congressional district populations have grown

    by an average of more than 180,000 constituents. That means Senators and Representatives areresponsible for representing more people than ever before.

    While congressional offices sincerely desire to hear from constituents, the rising volume of communicationsfrom citizens has overwhelmed Member offices. Unfortunately, an increasing number of offices faced withthe high volumes of communications have concluded that advocacy campaigns of identical form messagesare not genuinely being sent by the constituents whose names are on them and, therefore, do not warrantresponses.

    1As a result, offices are employing policies and practices to block, filter out, or ignore certain

    types of advocacy campaigns rather than capitalizing on the opportunities they present. In so doing, theyrisk alienating their most engaged constituents. Americans who contact Congress tend to be morepolitically active in other ways, and recent research showed almost half of all adult Americans had been intouch with a Member of Congress in the last five years.

    2

    In addition, many advocacy groups are focusing on finding efficientrather than effectivemeans to use theInternet to communicate with Congress. This has led to what is essentially an arms race, with many inCongress seeking means to keep messages out and citizens and the advocacy community seeking meansto get them through. Unfortunately, both sides have expended a great deal of time and energy attemptingto thwart the other, and what has developed is a system that no longer meets the needs of any of thestakeholders involved in the process.

    This capstone report of the Communicating with Congressprojectdraws from the vast amount of empiricaldata CMF has gathered from research on both sides of the communications equation. CMF first conductedfocus group, survey, and interview research with 350 congressional staffers from more than 200 House andSenate offices, gauging their perceptions of the increase in citizen communication. That researchculminated in the 2005 report Communicating with Congress: How Capitol Hill is Coping with the Surge inCitizen Advocacy. We then conducted two nationwide surveys with more than 10,000 citizens asking aboutthe perceptions and practices of those who had and had not communicated with Congress. Those findingsare detailed in the recently-released Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed CitizenEngagement. CMF has also conducted countless interviews, focus groups, and stakeholder meetings, aswell as a 200-person conference with representatives from both sides in the fall of 2007, in an effort tounderstand the magnitude of the challenges and the perspectives of the affected parties.

    1Brad Fitch and Kathy Goldschmidt, Communicating with Congress: How Capitol Hill is Coping with the Surge in Citizen Advocacy (Washington, DC:

    CMF, 2005), 31. http://www.cmfweb.org/storage/cmfweb/documents/CMF_Pubs/communicatingwithcongress_report1.pdf2

    Kathy Goldschmidt and Leslie Ochreiter, Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement (Washington, DC: CMF,2008), 10-11. http://www.cmfweb.org/storage/cmfweb/documents/CMF_Pubs/cwc_citizenengagement.pdf

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    DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENTIt is important to note that this report does not delve into specific technical specifications and requirements.We are cognizant that there are numerous technologies that can be brought to bear in streamlining andimproving communications between citizens and Members of Congress. However, our objective was not toidentify, review, or create a platform for doing so. Rather, our objective for this report is to discuss in detailthe various elements the high-level principles and considerations necessary to improve the process.CMF is prepared to facilitate future discussions to determine how to agree upon and implement a solutionand which technologies and resources will be necessary for a new model of citizen communications.

    In the following pages, we have attempted to paint a clear picture of the stakeholders and processesinvolved on both ends of the equation. There are separate sections on the citizens, the grassrootsorganizers, congressional offices, and the technology vendors that serve both sides. The next chaptergives a step-by-step description of how the senders and receivers do their jobs how a message iscreated, sent, received, processed and answered. Then we briefly walk through the history of how such aseemingly ordinary action became an arms race, and we finish by listing the ten core challenges to open,harmonious dialogue.

    The last half of the report is dedicated to discussing ways to improve the current environment. The mostfundamental idea put forth is a new model for constituent communications which we believe could not onlysignificantly reduce the burden on congressional offices but create fresh, welcome ways for elected officialsand the public to interact. We conclude with sets of specific recommendations for all the interested parties

    to consider adapting that would reduce barriers, promote better understanding and move the country closerto the vision held by the founding fathers of an open exchange of opinions.

    All of the Congressional Management Foundations (CMF) products and services are devoted to promotinga more effective Congress, and the Communicating with Congressproject is no exception. As a neutralthird party, CMF hopes that our objectivity can bridge the current divide and help the key stakeholders worktogether collaboratively to create a better system of communication. If efforts are not taken to improve thecurrent situation, we fear the breakdown will lead to wasted efforts by citizens and grassroots organizers,reduced productivity and responsiveness in congressional offices, and increased frustration on both CapitolHill and among the public with the quality of democratic dialogue.

    Our nation is currently at a crossroads. All parties can address this issue with openness and a willingnessto work together or each can continue to cling to the current, broken system. It is our hope that through this

    project and the release of this report, the concepts and recommendations that it puts forward can help takeconstituent communications to a new plane, create an environment of collaboration between citizens andMembers of Congress, and ultimately develop a new system that better serves the public interest.

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    Key Stakeholders to CongressionalCommunications

    In order to understand the challenges that exist in the communications processes between citizens andtheir elected representatives in Congress it is critical to understand the roles of the various stakeholders

    involved. While communications are ultimately about the interaction between individual citizens andindividual Members of Congress, there are a number of other players. Through our research, we haveidentified seven stakeholder groups. They are:

    Off Capitol Hill

    Citizens. Citizens are, of course, one of the two direct stakeholders in congressionalcommunications.

    Organizers of Grassroots Advocacy Campaigns. This broad category includes anyone or anyorganization interest groups, professional associations, employers, unions, clubs, etc. thatinitiate and facilitate communications around particular public policy issues between citizens andCongress.

    Vendors that Provide Tools to Facilitate Grassroots Advocacy Campaigns. These companiesprovide software tools that the organizers of advocacy campaigns use to generate and sendmessages to Capitol Hill.

    On Capitol Hill

    House and Senate Member Offices. Members of Congress are the second of the two directstakeholders of congressional communications, and their offices are responsible for managing andresponding to the incoming messages.

    Congressional Committee and Leadership Offices. The leadership offices of Congress providethe direction and agendas for both the House and Senate. Committees are subsets of each

    chamber, made up of members with specialized knowledge of the matters under the committeesjurisdiction. The committees of Congress are where the early consideration of legislation occurs.

    House and Senate Institutional Support Offices. These offices provide infrastructure andoperational support to House and Senate offices.

    Vendors that Provide Tools to Manage Constituent Communications. These companiesprovide congressional offices with software tools to help them manage their incoming and outgoingconstituent communications.

    Each of these stakeholders has a role to play whether it is direct, facilitative, strategic, or technical in theprocess by which communications are sent by citizens, received and processed by congressional offices,and responded to. As a result, all stakeholders must be considered in developing a concept for improvingthe process. Broad descriptions of each stakeholder and explanations of their roles are outlined below.

    Citizens

    Citizens are, of course, one of the two primary stakeholders in this process. From the very first Congress,individual citizens have petitioned their representatives in order to influence legislation that would affecttheir daily lives. In fact, the right to petition government for a redress of grievances is enshrined in the FirstAmendment to the Constitution, and this right is at the very core of our democracy. Citizens must be able tocommunicate with their government and be engaged in public policy in order to maintain a robust andhealthy democracy.

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    Citizen petitions have evolved a great deal over time and have utilized every form of communication, fromin-person meetings with Members to postcards, petitions, handwritten letters, telegrams, telephone calls,faxes, e-mails, and even, more recently, comments on blog posts. These communications can be heartfeltand awe-inspiring, they can be humble and emotional, or they can be demanding and inauspicious. Nomatter what form they take, citizens send communications to Capitol Hill because they want to participate inthe public policy process and they hope to affect the crafting of the laws that will govern their lives. With theadvent of e-mail and the Internet, the volume of these communications and other types ofcommunications to Congress has increased dramatically.

    Some of the senders of these communications expect their elected representatives to reply to their inquirieswhile others just want to register their views with no expectation of a response. In either case, citizensexpect to be heard and to have their representatives take their viewpoints into account when it comes timeto vote.

    The CMF report, Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement, givessome interesting information about the individuals who are communicating with Congress. Perhaps one ofthe most important facts this research revealed was that individuals who contact Members of Congressregistered higher rates of participation in political activities across the board than those who did not. Theyare a highly engaged portion of the population and are also highly influential within their social networks.

    These Poli-fluentials a term coined by the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI) to referto those who participate in political activities online are nearly seven times more likely than the generalpublic to be Influentials. They let others know of their opinions on everything from where to go on vacationto for whom to vote, and people listen to them. Poli-fluentials are technologically savvy online consumers ofnews and political information who serve as opinion leaders in their communities both on and offline.When consuming their news online, Poli-fluentials have a propensity to rely on user-generated content,specifically blogs. Theyre also more likely to take political action online, engaging in activities ranging fromsigning petitions to making online contributions.

    3

    The bottom line is that citizens want to participate in the political process, and the issues about which theycontact Members of Congress are important to them. Of the online survey respondents who had contactedone of their Members of Congress, 91% said that what motivated them to make contact was that the issuewas something they cared about deeply.

    4The role of these citizen-stakeholders cannot be overlooked;

    they are most basic element in our democratic process.

    3Carol Darr and Joseph Graf, eds., Poli-fluentials: The New Political Kingmakers. (Washington, DC: The George Washington University Graduate School

    of Political Management Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet, 2007) 17. http://www.ipdi.org/UploadedFiles/Polifluentials%20Report%20-%20Final.pdf4

    Kathy Goldschmidt and Leslie Ochreiter, Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement (Washington, DC: CMF,2008), 17. http://www.cmfweb.org/storage/cmfweb/documents/CMF_Pubs/cwc_citizenengagement.pdf

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    Organizers of Grassroots Advocacy Campaigns

    The term grassroots advocacy campaign is loosely defined as a group of like-minded citizens whocoalesce around a particular viewpoint or issue and through their collective power attempt to influence thedirection of future public policy. When French political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote ofhis travels through America in the mid-19

    thCentury, he emphasized the importance of political and civil

    associations in our American democracy. He wrote, The most natural right of man, after that of acting onhis own, is that of combining his efforts with those of his fellows and acting together. Therefore the right ofassociation seems to me by nature almost as inalienable as individual liberty.

    5

    Sometimes these associations or advocacy campaigns are instigated by individual citizens who aremotivated to band together to pool their influence over a particular issue or specific legislation. More often,however, they are the result of the organizing efforts of a corporation, a union, a professional association,an interest group, or some other pre-existing and ongoing affiliation. Both types of groups are stakeholdersin this process because they function as a funnel mechanism to educate individual citizens and thenchannel their energy to Capitol Hill.

    While grassroots advocacy campaigns have existed for some time, the Internet has created an environmentwhere organizers can easily, quickly, and inexpensively educate others about a particular issue andmobilize them to take action. That action can take a variety of forms, from donating money or volunteeringto protesting or contacting public officials. In some cases, their members would have never been aware ofa public policy debate taking place if it had not been brought to their attention by the grassrootsorganization. This is part of the reason citizens join. They look to these groups to alert them when public

    5Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer. (New York: Perennial Classics, 1969) 193.

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    DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENTpolicy potentially impacts an issue about which they have a particular interest. Those individualorganization members are then encouraged to perform some sort of action often to contact their electedofficials in an act of solidarity to demonstrate a broad base of political support for a particular viewpoint.

    The Internet has altered almost every aspect of our daily lives in some way. In the case of grassrootsadvocacy campaigns, it has created a considerable and ever-growing virtual universe where like-mindedindividuals can locate one another, share ideas, stay connected, and motivate each other to become activein some way. Blogs allow ordinary citizens to be on-the-ground journalists; a short video clip posted onYouTube can circle the globe in a matter of minutes; and social networking sites allow countlessopportunities for people to meet and interact. No matter how they participate, engagement in the politicalprocess is easier than it has ever been.

    In 2007,the Public Affairs Council reported that nearly three-quarters of U.S. corporations and all majornational associations have grassroots programs in place.

    6With the rise in the activity and sophistication of

    these advocacy strategies, it is no wonder that Congress has seen a dramatic increase in constituentcommunications volumes. In CMFs online survey of the citizen-senders of communications to Capitol Hill,fully 82% of those who had contacted congressional offices in the last five years had done so in the lastyear at the request of a third party interest group.

    7

    These campaigns have a predictable structure and usually follow a model of alerting the organizations

    members; educating them on an issues importance; assisting them in identifying their electedrepresentatives; urging them to perform an action; and giving them a deadline for participation. However,some campaigns are more effective than others. In fact, an entire industry has developed around how tobest motivate citizens to act and what gives those communications the desired impact when they arrive in apolicymakers office.

    Vendors that Provide Tools to Facilitate Grassroots Advocacy Campaigns

    While the primary stakeholders on this side of the communications equation are citizens and the grassrootsorganizers, vendors providing the tools to facilitate grassroots advocacy campaigns play a significant role inthe process as well.

    These businesses provide organizers with effective tools to maximize their grassroots advocacy campaigns

    impact on the development of public policy at all levels of government. These vendors do not just providethe software tools that facilitate the communication itself. Many of them depending on their size, mission,and market share also provide their clients with tools to assist in the development of comprehensivegrassroots campaign strategies, including guidance on effective tactics and mechanisms to ensure deliveryof their messages to the targeted public official.

    The typical vendor provides the organizers of grassroots advocacy campaigns with:

    Tools for sending action alerts to membership lists;

    Formats for developing educational material;

    Tools to match a citizens address with a specific congressional district;

    Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capabilities to track their various lobbying andgrassroots contacts with individual offices and membership lists;

    Background information and biographical data about Members of Congress, their voting records,committee assignments, legislative priorities, and staff contacts;

    Legislation tracking;

    Online fundraising management; and

    Grassroots strategy education, training, and consultation.

    6Foundation for Public Affairs, State of Corporate Public Affairs (Washington, DC: Foundation for Public Affairs, 2005), 17-19.

    7Kathy Goldschmidt and Leslie Ochreiter, Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement (Washington, DC: CMF,

    2008), 21. http://www.cmfweb.org/storage/cmfweb/documents/CMF_Pubs/cwc_citizenengagement.pdf

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    House and Senate Member Offices

    The individual Member offices of the U.S. Congress are, of course, the receivers of the vast majority ofcitizen communications to Capitol Hill. As such, they, along with citizens, are the most direct and directlyimpacted stakeholders of the communications process. With the population of the U.S. at more than 300million, the 100 Senators, 435 House Members, 4 Delegates, and 1 Resident Commissioner face adaunting task, especially as the volumes of communications continue to rise and technology continues toincrease citizens expectations for what Congress can and should be providing them.

    The job of a Member of Congress can be distilled down into two primary functions: legislative representationand constituent service. While it is the job of Congress as a whole to create the nations laws and performoversight as necessary to ensure their implementation, it is the job of each individual Member of Congressto represent the interests of the district or state they were elected to serve. Members of Congress do thisby promoting their own legislative initiatives, cosponsoring bills introduced by other Members, workingwithin the congressional committees, and voting on legislation that makes it to the House or Senate floor.

    The second major function of a congressional office is providing constituents with services, such as helpingthem resolve problems with federal agencies; nominating young people to U.S. Service Academies,coordinating efforts with other local and state government officials; and processing tour, flag, meeting, andpresidential greeting requests.

    The vast majority of the messages received by congressional offices relate to the Members legislativefunction. They come from individuals who wish to communicate their positions on legislation and issuesthat affect their lives.

    In the past, House offices had one staff member a Legislative Correspondent typically located in theWashington, D.C. office dedicated to organize and assist the Member in responding to citizen comments.Today, it is rare that a congressional office relies on the resources of just one staffer. Some congressionaloffices state that they dedicate up to 50% of their overall staff resources to constituent communications.While Senate offices typically have larger staff sizes and more overall resources dedicated to handlingconstituent communications than their House counterparts, they usually have much larger constituenciesand face the same challenges in keeping pace with the incoming volumes of e-mail and postal mail as theirHouse counterparts.

    Congressional Committee and Leadership Offices

    While the personal offices of Members of Congress receive the majority of incoming constituentcommunications, more and more committees and leadership offices find themselves on the receiving end ofboth individual citizen comments, as well as the target of organized grassroots advocacy campaigns. Afterall, it is in the leadership offices of the House and Senate where legislative priorities and chamberschedules are developed and in committees where legislation is almost always referred before it is evervoted on in either chamber.

    Because most of these offices do not provide an electronic communication channel, many citizens andgrassroots advocacy campaigns attempt to communicate by faxing, writing, or calling committee andleadership offices. Some citizens and grassroots advocacy campaigns attempt to contact individual

    Members of a committee electronically by going to their personal office Web sites, but are unable to do sobecause of state and district authentication measures offices employ to ensure that people who are notconstituents cannot contact them online. As you can see in Figure 2, a majority of the 69 House andSenate committee Web sites (both majority and minority committee sites) and 13 leadership offices of theHouse and Senate (both Democrat and Republican sites) do not currently have mechanisms or resourcesto take in or respond to a large number of citizen questions and comments. While it would be nearlyimpossible without a significant increase in their budgets to suggest that all congressional committeeand leadership offices of Congress should respond to citizen communications, it is important to note that agrowing number of committee and leadership offices do solicit and value public feedback in some form.

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    DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENTFigure 2 shows the number of committee and leadership offices allowing electronic communications withcitizens.

    House and Senate Institutional Support Offices

    Institutional support offices, primarily embodied in the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) of theHouse of Representatives and the Office of the Senate Sergeant at Arms (SAA), are stakeholders because

    of the critical role they play in providing technical infrastructure and operational support for congressionaloffices. As part of their committee jurisdiction, the Committee on House Administration (CHA) and theSenate Committee on Rules and Administration provide oversight of these support offices and areresponsible for the policy framework within which the communications processes must operate.

    These organizations serve congressional offices through the structuring and maintenance of the CMS andCSS vendor contracts and relationships, as well as through providing systems support, security, andenterprise services such as e-mail and Internet connectivity to congressional offices. In addition, theseorganizations provide congressional offices with guidance on the House and Senate rules that governconstituent communications and help to identify developing trends, office needs, and future technologydirection in the House and Senate.

    Vendors that Provide Tools to Manage Congressional Communications

    Almost every congressional office uses tools and services to help them efficiently and effectively managethe thousands of constituent communications they receive each week. These products are collectivelyreferred to as Correspondence Management Systems (CMS) in the House of Representatives and asConstituent Services Systems (CSS) in the U.S. Senate. In either case, they are database tools that helpcongressional offices manage and track their interactions with constituents including constituent servicesand constituent communications. While some products have modules to organize the Members schedule,manage interactions with press, and track legislation, the core competencies of these products assistcongressional offices in tracking correspondence, authenticating state or district origin, managing a formletter library, and responding to constituent queries.

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    The vendors that provide these tools and services to congressional offices are stakeholders because of therole that they play in facilitating communications to and from the offices they serve. Every congressionaloffice operates independently, so each Members staff works with their own vendor to customize theirdatabase and establish processes to help them maintain these mission-critical utilities. In addition, thevendors conduct the necessary technical integration and configuration to enable the systems to operateeffectively within an offices technological infrastructure. In short, these vendors provide the services andsupport necessary to streamline the process of receiving, managing, and responding to constituentcommunications and to maximize the benefits of their platform.

    As of the writing of this report, there are five approved CMS vendors in the House of Representatives andthree approved CSS vendors in the Senate providing the software packages that are the lifeblood of theoffices constituent communications operation. Approved means that the House and Senate have testedthese products to ensure they comply with the functionality and security requirements of each chamber.

    While the above-mentioned stakeholders perform disparate functions and represent a multitude ofperspectives, desires, and goals, each plays a key role in the communications between citizens andCongress. Because of the importance of the topic and the need to devise a more effective and efficientsystem, each of these groups will need to be engaged in the process of identifying and vetting any potential

    change to the current communications model. Diplomacy and collaboration among all of the variousstakeholders are needed to devise a workable solution to the current communications problems. To datethere has been little dialogue as each group has pursued its own agenda rather than joining forces to tacklethe challenges together.

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    Communications Process Overview

    Communications between constituents and Members of Congress have evolved over time as differentmechanisms have become available. Before e-mail made a marked presence on Capitol Hill, mostmessages to Member offices were via postal mail or fax. Long distance telephone calls to Washington fromcitizens used to be cost-prohibitive, but are now commonplace, especially when time is of the essence.Few people could have imagined 20 years ago that there would be entirely new methods of communicationthat would evolve in the way that the Internet and e-mail have. Because the great majority of thechallenges in the current process exist as a result of the Internet and e-mail, most of our discussion willfocus on these media.

    Given the changes in communication over time, it is important to understand and appreciate the processesas they operate today, rather than holding on to an outdated or unrealistic view of what may have takenplace 100 years ago or even a few decades ago. Those who believe that every single communicationsent to Capitol Hill is crafted by individual citizens who are sitting at their kitchen tables putting pen to paperwill be shocked to learn that advocacy groups now assist and motivate many if not most of the citizenswho contact Congress with the process of transmitting, and often of drafting, their communications.Similarly those who believe that a Member of Congress is sitting in his or her office with a letter opener inhand, or behind a computer waiting to hear the words, youve got mail, may also be disappointed to learn

    that Members receive so much mail that this simply is not practical. Although most Representatives andSenators are involved in the constituent mail process in some way, their staff does the bulk of the workmanaging and responding to the communications they receive.

    Neither of these romantic views accurately reflects the current state of affairs, so the rest of this chapterprovides a realistic view of how communications are managed on both sides of the process.

    Constituent Action

    Individual Communications

    There are two primary ways in which a citizen currently initiates contact with an elected representative. Inthe first, an individual citizen writes a letter, writes an e-mail, places a call, or otherwise takes the personal

    initiative to contact a Senator or Representative on an issue about which he or she cares. Perhaps thecitizen follows that issue very closely, or is aware of legislation pending before Congress because of anewspaper article, blog post, radio segment, or television program. In most cases, the constituent willeither sit down to hand-write a letter to send via postal mail, or, more frequently, will send an e-mail bysubmitting it through a Web form on the Members Web site or via the Members public e-mail address.These are considered by many congressional offices to be individualcommunications, and they are distinctfrom communications organized and directly facilitated by a third party, such as an interest group.Individual communications can be anything from short, one-sentence e-mails asking the Member to supporta particular bill or amendment to multi-page dissertations with facts, figures, and voluminous historicinformation about any given topic.

    Grassroots Advocacy Campaigns

    Messages sent to congressional offices using tools that generate and facilitate broad citizen support oropposition to particular legislative actions are often referred to as grassroots advocacy campaigns. Thecitizen might be involved in a grassroots advocacy campaign because he or she is interested in, or amember of, an organization with a particular affiliation corporate, union, or professional or an issue oradvocacy-related mission, such as AARP, Sierra Club, or the National Rifle Association.

    Typically, an organization initiates a grassroots advocacy campaign to Congress by either sending out anaction alert to its membership, or by posting information on its Web site about upcoming legislative action.These action alerts attempt to motivate a group of citizens to become involved in an issue and ultimately tosend a message to their elected representatives to influence a legislative outcome. This, of course, is

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    NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REPRODUCTIONintended to demonstrate to a Member of Congress that a large number of his or her constituents share asimilar viewpoint, with the hope that this will have an impact on the Members position.

    Utilizing sophisticated tools to create, manage, and track these communications allows organizations toproduce organized and highly-effective grassroots advocacy campaigns that facilitate the interactionbetween citizens and Members of Congress.

    When citizens participate in a grassroots advocacy campaign online now the most common waycampaigns are organized prepared text is often provided that states the groups position and messages toconvey to the Member. The resulting messages might be delivered via fax, telephone, postal letter, or othermeans, but most frequently, they are delivered via e-mail. Citizens usually have the option of deleting,modifying, or adding their own text, but often citizens choose to send the text as-is. The result is thatMembers receive numerous communications with identical language and formatting. Given the mistrustmany congressional staff have of identical form messages,

    8however, many organizations now provide

    talking points and encourage those participating in their advocacy campaigns to craft their own personalmessage, or to customize suggested text with information about the citizens own perspective andexperience.

    In addition, the organizers provide their members with the ability to send the same communication to both oftheir Senators and their Representative, and they perform the legwork to ensure the delivery of those

    messages.

    Congressional Office Action

    Regardless of whether the missives are from individual constituents or the product of a grassroots advocacycampaign, these communications are ultimately transmitted to a congressional offices CMS or CSSproduct. While it is a highly individualized process, each office has various tools at their disposal to processcitizen communications. Some offices use the incoming issue code from their own Web form to assignincoming letters to particular staffers; others rely on system rules or CMS/CSS features that allow offices togroup or batch similar communications together. They do this in an attempt to aggregate similarcommunications together so all citizens writing about the same issue can receive the Members reply letterand so that the office has an idea how many people share the same opinion about a particular topic.Regardless of the method, it is primarily a manual, and time-consuming, sorting and logging process.

    In a typical House or Senate office, once the messages have been sorted the letter will be assigned to aLegislative Correspondent (LC) or Legislative Assistant (LA). That staffer will begin the process ofidentifying existing text or drafting new language to respond to the citizens communication and explain theMembers relevant views and actions. The process is nearly identical for postal letters, faxes, andtelephone calls; each communication is entered into the system and then processed in much the same way.Then, that first draft of a particular response begins its path through the approval process which varies fromoffice to office, but almost always involves a review of the draft to ensure that the response accuratelyreflects the Members position, is consistent with his or her legislative record, and is free from typographicor grammatical errors. There can be many people in the review and approval process, including theLegislative Assistant, the Legislative Director, the Chief of Staff, and the Member.

    Once the draft has made its way through the offices review process and any subsequent rewrites, final

    approval is given. The response is sent to the individual constituent by either postal mail or e-mail,depending on the original senders communication method and office policy.

    Some congressional offices have adopted a policy of responding to the communication in the same way inwhich they received it, meaning an incoming e-mail will get an outgoing e-mail reply. Others will send an e-mail reply to a constituent if they have the citizens e-mail address on file from previous communications.

    8Brad Fitch and Kathy Goldschmidt, Communicating with Congress: How Capitol Hill is Coping with the Surge in Citizen Advocacy (Washington, DC:

    CMF, 2005), 31. http://www.cmfweb.org/storage/cmfweb/documents/CMF_Pubs/communicatingwithcongress_report1.pdf

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    12 COMMUNICATING WITH CONGRESS

    Still other congressional offices refuse to embrace e-mail response methods and opt to answer all incomingcommunications with a printed letter.

    In addition, it is commonplace in most congressional offices to produce a mail report on constituentcorrespondence. These mail reports vary from office to office, but they typically contain aggregated totalsby subject matter of how many people contacted the representative on an issue and by their position. Sinceit is not possible for most Members of Congress to physically read every message in its entirety, this reportgives them a dashboard view of the constituent communications coming in. Members may see reports on aregular basis or view them before important votes. While they know the people who contact them are notnecessarily scientifically representative of their states and districts, they do take into account the sentimentof those who felt strongly enough about an issue to contact them.

    Figure 3 follows the flow of constituent communications from individual constituents and those funneledthrough a third party advocacy organization to congressional offices and back again. Although this processappears to be straightforward, there are currently a number of bumps in the road between constituents andCongress that creates some significant communications challenges for all of the stakeholders. Many ofthese are related to the significant changes technology and the Internet have brought to thecommunications process; changes to which neither side has yet completely adapted. As a result,frustration is currently high, and the stakeholders on both sides are accusing the other side of beingunreasonable, behaving disingenuously, and using practices that are damaging to democracy. CMF has

    identified the core challenges, discussed in detail in the following section.

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    The Arms Race

    When the first e-mails arrived on Capitol Hill around 1995, individual citizens were using this emergingmedium to contact their elected representatives through open, public e-mail addresses. Within a few years,the novelty of this new technology started to wear off as the volume of constituent communication increasedbeyond offices existing capacities to handle it, as they received a larger and larger volume of e-mail from

    non-constituents, and as they were subjected to more and more commercial spam.

    In 2000, individual Member offices began to create a more structured system using zip code matching toverify communications were from the Members state or district. Constituent verification was not possiblewith public e-mail addresses, so congressional offices began to abandon their public e-mail addresses infavor of contact forms on their Web sites, which would allow Members to limit communications to those fromtheir own states or districts. This act to impose a more structured communications system was thebeginning of a technological arms race between congressional offices and grassroots advocacycampaigns that continues to this day.

    The congressional Web forms thwarted and frustrated an emerging and increasingly active onlinecommunity. The forms not only limited citizens abilities to communicate electronically with Senators andRepresentatives that did not represent them, they made it more difficult to conduct online grassroots

    advocacy campaigns. The organizers of grassroots campaigns had become accustomed to managing theircampaigns via their Web sites and providing their advocates with assistance, such as providing suggestedtext and allowing participants to construct one message that could be sent to more than one Member. TheWeb forms not only added extra steps for their members to send messages, they made it more difficult tomanage online campaigns because each Members Web form was structured differently.

    To help the organizers of grassroots advocacy campaigns more easily do their work, a new industryemerged. Technology vendors stepped in to enable individuals and organizations to collect information viatheir own Web sites that could be used to populate the forms on Members Web sites. Advocacycampaigns could then be organized on a single Web site that provided added capabilities to their citizenmembers. These sophisticated tools escalated the arms race and Congress, once again, saw a markedincrease in the volumes of constituent communications they were receiving.

    Congressional offices responded by devising strategies to help them better manage the increased volume.In addition to adding e-mail filters and new rules within their offices, they developed sophisticated Webforms that required correspondents to choose from a list of specific subject areas. Incoming messagescould be automatically sorted and grouped by subject and assigned to the appropriate staffer. In doing this,however, they created another barrier to organized campaigns, as the technologies at the time were notcapable of handling these subject menus. It did not take long, of course, before the vendors upgraded theirsoftware and online grassroots campaigns were back in business.

    The next escalation, and the one that is still resonating, came in the summer of 2006 when the firstCompletely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs) beganappearing on congressional Web sites. Congressional offices that use them do so to ensure electroniccommunications come only through the action of real humans typing information directly into the contactforms on their Web sites. Examples are images that contain letters and numbers that users must type intothe form or simple logic puzzles that users must answer before their message is sent. The intent is to provethat humans are filling out Web forms, not computers. These tools were not solely created to blockadvocacy campaigns of identical form messages, but as an effort to block commercial spam messageswhich can be very disruptive to office CMS/CSS systems. However, because the tools advocacycampaigns use depend on technology which enters data collected on one Web site into the forms oncongressional Web sites, these tactics effectively disabled most independent online advocacy campaigns.

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    NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REPRODUCTIONThe reasons congressional offices give for using CAPTCHAs include:

    Eliminating commercial spam, which was coming in through their Web forms in unmanageablevolumes;

    Ensuring messages are sent with the knowledge, consent, and direct action of a particularconstituent, which, justifiably or not, offices began to doubt was the case with many online

    grassroots advocacy campaigns of identical form messages; Enabling them to easily identify and prioritize personal communications from constituents over the

    identical form messages sent through many grassroots advocacy campaigns; and

    Reducing the volume of incoming messages and thereby making communications moremanageable.

    Although the intention behind the use of CAPTCHAs was to help congressional offices manage theirworkload better, the response was swift and public. Unlikely partnerships formed between organizations atopposite ends of the political and philosophical spectrum to protest the use of CAPTCHAs. While theseorganizations missions represented most visibly by the members of the DontBlockMyVoice.org andDontSilencethePeople.org coalitions are widely divergent, they found common ground when it came togetting their messages to Capitol Hill. They quickly banded together to advocate for unimpededcommunication to Congress and to identify and publicly shame the Members who were using CAPTCHAs.The movement gained some ground, a number of news articles appeared, and some prominent bloggersbegan to call on Congress to abandon the use of CAPTCHAs.

    In addition to these organizations belief that CAPTCHA requirements are antithetical to the FirstAmendments freedom of speech and right to petition government provisions, their various objections to theuse of CAPTCHA tools on congressional Web forms include:

    CAPTCHAs discourage participation in the political process and dissuade interaction by addingextra and to some people onerous steps to the communications process;

    CAPTCHAs thwart real constituents who want to join forces with others to influence legislation byparticipating in organized advocacy campaigns;

    Some graphical CAPTCHAs are impossible for citizens with disabilities to use;

    Some logic-based CAPTCHAs have a degree of difficulty that create a certain intelligence thresholdfor participation in the democratic process; and

    Even for the average citizen CAPTCHA tools can create confusion and can be a deterrent fromcommunicating at all.

    It is important to note that only a very small number of offices are using CAPTCHAs, so this practice is notprevalent. However, it is indicative of a growing sentiment on Capitol Hill that the messages sent throughadvocacy campaigns must be verified as being the result of direct actions by real humans or be eliminated.In any case, many CAPTCHAs have proven to be ineffective at blocking messages, since technology existsto maneuver around them.

    Finally, a small number of congressional offices have resorted to blocking the Internet protocol (IP)addresses of computers from which they do not wish to receive any electronic communications. Thismeans that, by identifying the computers used by the advocacy organizers vendors, offices can effectivelykeep out any message sent by that vendors clients, no matter what their issues or advocacy practices are.

    Desperation is driving congressional offices to take these extreme measures. Although there are very fewoffices in this group, many congressional staff can empathize with their colleagues who employ suchtactics.

    Congressional offices have also had to make various management and operational decisions about how tohandle their constituent communications. Many have reallocated staff resources away from other tasks likecasework and legislative activities to manage the growing volumes of communication. Others have adoptedsophisticated technologies to automate data entry and streamline correspondence management. Still

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    DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENTothers have implemented policies and practices to simplify the processes for researching, writing, andapproving responses. A growing number of offices wholeheartedly embrace grassroots advocacycampaigns as an opportunity to identify new constituent contacts and to communicate with more peoplethan ever before.

    This continuing arms race is counterproductive because everyone ultimately has the same objective: a real,authentic dialogue between citizens and elected representatives. Both sides are essentially right, but theproblem has arisen because neither side has been willing to understand fully the position of the other andcome together to establish a more effective system. Both sides have been more intent on using technologyto achieve their own short-term objectives without considering the implications of their mutual long-termobjective to facilitate and enhance democratic communication.

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    Current Communications Challenges

    What has become clear through the Communicating with Congressproject is that technology has foreverchanged the way that citizens and Members of Congress interact. Much of that change has been positive,particularly with the increase in the number of people who are now contacting their elected officials onlineand becoming engaged in the political process. Unfortunately, managing the increased volumes has been,for many congressional offices, like trying to take a sip from a fire hose.

    When faced with a complex challenge with such significant ramifications, it is critical to identify all theproblems that need to be addressed. In order to compile a comprehensive list of the issues facingcongressional offices, individual constituents, and grassroots organizations, CMF engaged all of thestakeholder groups through surveys, focus groups, workshops, and a public conference. The following listpresents them in the order we identified through our research as most to least critical.

    1. The sheer volume of citizen communications has become difficult for congressional offices tomanage.

    With the increased population of the United States, Senators and Representatives now represent morepeople than ever before and, due to the Internet and advances in technology, it is easier than ever

    before for people to get in touch with them. As a result, congressional offices are struggling to manageconstituent communications effectively. The number of messages to Congress have increaseddramatically, and the totals are expected to increase steadily for the foreseeable future. Most Houseand Senate offices feel overwhelmed and, in many cases, have decided that the only options arefinding means to reduce the volume, prioritizing some communications over others, and/or filtering outor ignoring some messages altogether. While the grassroots community is sympathetic to the situationon Capitol Hill, they insist that the communications are from citizens exercising their rights to freespeech and to petition government and, therefore, must not be overlooked or discarded.

    2. House and Senate offices have limited staff, money, and space for adapting to their increasedworkloads.

    Congressional staff sizes have been roughly the same since the mid-1970s, long before the Internet

    and e-mail and even fax machines changed the way citizens contacted their electedrepresentatives. Though offices workloads have increased significantly, they must make do with thesame number of employees, which requires them to be very efficient and somewhat creative in theirapproach to their work. Offices budgets have not kept pace with the demands either, and increasingcongressional budgets is a political challenge that few are willing to take on, especially given the currentstate of the economy. Finally, space in congressional offices is at a premium. In fact, the Architect ofthe Capitol found that the population density in House offices is five times that of the typical officebuilding.

    9Even if offices had the money to hire more staff to manage the work, it would be difficult to

    find space to accommodate them without exploring alternatives such as telecommuting or remote worksites.

    3. Congressional staff mistrust identical form communications.

    Many congressional offices are suspicious of advocacy campaigns consisting of identical formmessages because of concerns that the messages are not real. They believe these campaigns aresent without constituents knowledge or approval that they are being generated by organizationsusing their membership lists without any direct action by the constituents whose names are on them.

    10

    This mistrust leads many offices to assign some or all advocacy campaigns a lower priority thanpersonalized messages or to filter out or ignore these communications. The grassroots communityacknowledges there are some groups that engage in deceptive practices, but they argue that the vast

    9Elizabeth Brotherton, Visualizing A Happier Workplace, Roll Call April 21, 2008, 3.

    10Brad Fitch and Kathy Goldschmidt, Communicating with Congress: How Capitol Hill is Coping with the Surge in Citizen Advocacy (Washington, DC:

    CMF, 2005), 31. http://www.cmfweb.org/storage/cmfweb/documents/CMF_Pubs/communicatingwithcongress_report1.pdf

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    DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENTmajority of the communications are legitimately from constituents who performed a direct action totransmit their views, even if the person did not write it personally. They worry that congressional officeswill summarily reject or ignore all communications that originate from a third party because of theactions of a few bad players.

    4. Incorrect, generic, and corrupt electronic data create unnecessary work for congressional offices.

    Congressional offices report that they often receive electronic communications via advocacy campaignswith data that consume significant resources for them to fix and process. Sometimes the mistakes arethe result of a technical glitch, such as when an office changes a field on its online contact form and ittakes a few days for the vendors to adjust their systems accordingly. Other times, the mistakes aretypos, incorrect addresses, and zip codes that do not correspond to addresses. Occasionally, genericdata is included in every message (e.g. the same zip code or salutation on every message) becausethe organizer of the campaign cannot or will not customize it or ask their membership to do so. In anycase, congressional staff must spend a great deal of time identifying, troubleshooting, and fixing theproblems before they can even begin to process and respond to the messages. With the volume ofcommunications offices receive, they must weigh the benefits of devoting the time to correct the data.

    5. The lack of Congress-wide electronic data standards for citizen communications createssignificant complexity for both sides of the communications.

    At present, electronic communications to most congressional offices must be sent via the individualforms on the Web sites of each Member. With the exception of House offices that use a genericversion of the Write Your Representative online contact form, each office creates and maintains its ownWeb form. A few even still have public e-mail addresses. As a result, the organizers of grassrootsadvocacy campaigns must be able to format their messages correctly for every office they are targeting.

    They must also be sure to include the information each office seeks.For example, some offices require zip-plus-four, others require titles,telephone numbers, or a response to a CAPTCHA logic puzzle.Collecting and formatting information for every office targeted isdifficult and time-consuming for the campaigns organizers, and it canoften lead to the problems congressional offices face when theyreceive incorrect, generic, and corrupt data. As a result, both sides

    would save significant resources if there were Congress-widestandards or at least separate House-wide and Senate-widestandards for electronic citizen communications.

    If you dont respect that this

    information is coming from real

    citizens, then you dont have

    .respect for democracy

    Grassroots advocacy perspective sharedatCommunicating with Congress conference

    6. Congressional offices view personalized messages and identical form messages differently.

    Identical form messages are largely viewed by the organizers of grassroots advocacy campaigns as away to engage their members, generate volume and demonstrate strength in numbers. For somegroups, however, their objectives are less about persuading Members of Congress and more aboutkeeping their members engaged and motivated. Congressional offices, on the other hand, usually viewidentical form messages as general indicators of public opinion, at best, or as ersatz advocacy that canbe ignored, at worst. Some offices embrace them as opportunities to collect data (e.g. interests,affiliations, and e-mail addresses), but few base decisions on identical form campaigns alone. A

    customized message, on the other hand, is often judged by offices as more authoritative and real,since they offer proof that a person took the time and effort to draft it. It is easier to tell that thesemessages are genuine even though they are more difficult for congressional offices to respond to andare more difficult for advocacy organizations to generate. However, many congressional offices valuepersonalized messages more than identical form ones, and, even in small numbers, they can influencea Members decisions in a way that greater-volume campaigns of identical form messages do not.

    11The grassroots community wants their messages to be meaningful and to be easy for offices to digest.

    11Ibid, 28.

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    NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REPRODUCTIONThe challenge is to find a way to do this, since it does not seem possible given the current technologies,practices, and attitudes on Capitol Hill.

    7. Current congressional systems can make it very difficult to deliver a timely grassroots advocacycampaign.

    In order to have the greatest impact on a particular vote, the advocacy community often conductsgrassroots campaigns in the days and weeks leading up to a particular congressional action. However,because of the post-anthrax challenges of paper mail andhand-delivery, as well as the many hurdles to e-mail, manyadvocacy groups have decided that the fax is the best wayto deliver messages that must get through under adeadline. Yet, congressional staff rate faxes as their leastpreferred method of communication (43% said they had noinfluence at all

    12) because they require labor-intensive

    data entry and are, therefore, a significant drain onalready-strained congressional resources. Additionally,because of the necessary effort to aggregate and digitizethe information, faxes rarely achieve the stated goal oftimely communication. As a result, organizations that

    choose a fax delivery method may not achieve their goalof delivering timely messages and having the greatestpossible impact on the legislation that affects them.

    It is personally offensive to hear

    that we are trying to stifle free

    speechWe have extremely limited

    resources. I take great pride in my

    work and I want to answer every

    single letter with a personalized

    letter. Its just not possible.

    Congressional office perspective shared atCommunicating with Congress conference

    8. Many congressional offices do not respond to e-mail via e-mail.

    Although responding to e-mail with e-mail would save congressional offices time and money and enablethem to answer constituents more quickly, many refuse to do so. The most frequently-cited reason isthat Members and/or senior managers fear their communications will be altered and forwarded toconstituents or the press, resulting in political problems. In addition, many congressional offices cling tothe perception that a response on letterhead with a Members signature has more impact on aconstituent, while ignoring the implicit communication preference of the individual contacting them.

    9. Not all citizens desire a response to their communications to Congress.

    Congressional offices feel a great deal of pressure to reply to all of their constituents communications,which is why most prioritize some messages over others. However, not all constituents want an answerfrom their Members of Congress, but merely wish to register their opinions. Our survey of citizensfound that 91% of Internet users who had contacted Congress, and 82% of those who had not,indicated that they would want to receive a response to any messages they send to Congress.

    13This

    reveals that while most citizens want a reply, 9% to 18% respectively do not necessarily desire aresponse. Cutting out even that small amount of workload would add up. However, few congressionaloffices use any mechanisms to enable constituents to state their opinions and to opt out of getting ananswer. As a result, congressional offices are determining which messages receive responses andwhich do not, and it is possible that not all of them are making the most effective decisions.

    10.Citizens desire to communicate with committees and leadership offices.

    Although our form of government has not historically accommodated it, many citizens and grassrootsorganizations desire to make their views known to congressional leaders and committee members whodo not represent them. The primary reason citizens seek to engage the committee and leadershipmembers of the U.S. Congress is that the legislative agenda and the early drafting take place with

    12Ibid, 30.

    13Kathy Goldschmidt and Leslie Ochreiter, Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement (Washington, DC: CMF,

    2008), 26. http://www.cmfweb.org/storage/cmfweb/documents/CMF_Pubs/cwc_citizenengagement.pdf

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    DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENTthese offices. When citizens attempt to contact Members other than their own, these messages areusually forwarded to the appropriate Member or ignored because offices do not have the resources toanswer non-constituents.

    While many of these challenges seem daunting, CMF believes you cannot solve a problem withoutunderstanding all the components that contribute to its complexity. It was through this identification thatmany of the concepts and recommendations that follow originated.

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    NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REPRODUCTION

    A New Model for Constituent Communications

    With a firm foundation laid of who the players are and how they operate, we will move on to discussimprovements to allow for a more free-flowing dialogue between citizens and Congress. The next fewsections will describe a new model or new structure for transmitting and receiving communications to andfrom congressional offices. We describe the origins and key principles of this next-generation method ofcommunication before giving detailed information, including screenshots, on how it would work and how itwould be implemented.

    Because CMF considers this report to be a collaborative effort, these ideas are being offered for a period ofpublic comment to allow interested parties, intimately invested stakeholders, and members of the generalpublic to provide even more feedback. It is our hope that the process of incorporating the thoughts of sucha diverse group of individuals will further enhance the final report that will follow.

    Origins of the New Model

    The new model for constituent communications was a collaborative effort between CMF and representativeexperts from each stakeholder group that evolved over the course of this project. For instance, the conceptof dual-channel communications is predicated on a presentation by Daniel Bennett at the Communicating

    with Congressconference. As coauthor of The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy is Changing the PoliticalLandscape, a former congressional staffer, and former president of the House Systems AdministratorsAssociation, he discussed the inclusion of a unique identifier he referred to it as a Topic Code ingrassroots advocacy communications as a method for aggregating similar communications together.

    As we discussed this concept and other possibilities with key stakeholders, a consensus developed that theinclusion of the unique identifier would be extremely useful and should be the core of any new model forcitizen communications. There were, however, other elements that could be included in a new system thatwould provide even more value to both sides beyond just the aggregation of similar communications. Toaddress all of the identified core challenges and provide additional value, Rob Pierson, a congressionalstaffer and then-president of the House Systems Administrators Association, assisted CMF with theidentification of a number of other key elements that would help address some of the core communicationschallenges discussed earlier.

    The model that emerged was discussed with many key parties from the various stakeholder groups prior tothe publishing of this report. We included in these discussions representatives from House and Senateleadership, institutional, and Member offices; all of the House and Senate CMS/CSS vendors; theCommunicating with CongressWorking Group, a coalition of grassroots advocacy vendors; advocacygroups representing a broad spectrum interests, and many thought leaders on this topic. Each added theirinsights, and in some cases, their criticisms and concerns. With each of these discussions, CMF sought toclarify the concept, identify its shortcomings, and strengthen the structure and efficacy of this new approachto citizen communications.

    The Key Principles

    Putting forward a new concept that changes the current citizen communications model is both ambitiousand complicated. CMF wanted very much to identify a new process that would ease the current burden oncongressional staff. We soon realized, however, that while there were quick and easy fixes to existingproblems and challenges, not all of them were palatable because of their detrimental impact on the dialogueon which our democracy is based. We could not, for instance, recommend that Congress ignore or block allelectronic messages that do not originate from their own Web forms because our research revealed theintricate and irreversible role of third party grassroots organizations.

    On the other hand, we certainly could not recommend that all congressional offices revert to public e-mailaddresses and accept communications from not only their own states and districts, but also from the rest of

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    DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENTthe nation. Congressional offices that can barely manage the volumes they are getting from their ownconstituents are hardly in a position to tackle messages from all 50 states.

    It is important that any new model take into account the realities and deep complexities of the problem.Given the great number of stakeholders and hurdles, it is clear that any new system needs to address asmany issues as possible while navigating around deal breakers from each sides perspective. We setforward the following key principles to guide the development of any potential solutions. The new modelhad to be:

    1. Trustworthy In order to develop and implement a truly effective new model, both sides of thecommunications process must understand that they share the same overarching objective:meaningful dialogue between the representatives and the represented. Members of Congress wantto hear from their constituents and to use their opinions to help guide their activities in Congress.Citizens and grassroots organizations want to engage their members and help shape public policy.Our concept acknowledges this symbiotic relationship that requires both sides to place significanttrust in the other to engage in actions that further, not undermine, their shared objective. Whilethere always have been and always will be actors on both sides that, in fact, do violate this trust, ashared goal of quality communication should allow both sides to have a modicum of faith that theother is acting in the interest of democracy. Unless both sides actually commit to extending thebenefit of the doubt, however, and adapt their practices accordingly, the right to petition government

    threatens to become nothing more than an empty pretense on both sides.

    2. Authentic For meaningful dialogue to take place between citizens and their elected officials, thecommunications must be genuine messages from real people. Every grassroots advocacyorganizer should reject false methods of generating communications and give assurance that everymessage is sent with the knowledge, consent, and action of individual citizens.

    3. Effective