Are your constituents emailing Congress? Are they being heard?

Chances are the answer is ‘no’ according to Daniel Bennett, author of The Net Effect and speaker at the Center for American Progress’s Internet Advocacy Roundtable, where he proposed a solution to the “email your congressman dilema.” In his presentation last Thursday, Mr. Bennett outlined several myths about emails to Congress. One that he particularly focused on is the idea that constituents need to write their own unique, individual letters in order for Congressional staffers to read them. In fact, he said, it just makes it harder for the staffers to keep up.

It all started with the web form, which Bennett takes credit for creating. As email became the overwhelming choice of contacting representatives, congressional staffers couldn’t keep up, especially as advocacy groups started mobilizing their constituents around email. Hundreds of thousands of identical emails would sometimes be sent because of a single advocacy campaign. Sometimes offices would turn off their emails, just to stop the flow. The myth evolved that those emails didn’t seem to count. And so the idea that writing individual letters would be better was born. Vendors were quick to create web forms that gave tips, or pieces of letters that constituents could cut and paste to create their “own” letter. But that hasn’t helped, Bennett says.

You have to understand, Bennett explained, “there isn’t a formula.” You can’t think that 100 handwritten letters would be the same as 10,000 emails, or that 10,000 emails would be the same thing as a lobbyist and 1,000 donors. There just isn’t a formula.

What happens today is that emails come in and most congressional offices will “bundle” them with anywhere from 50%-90% accuracy. His solution would increase that accuracy to 100%. His idea? To add a unique tag, or topic code, to each email form that a constituent uses to email Congress. This topic code would be the URL of the page users see before getting to that form- that way if the congressional staff is interested, they can see just what prompted the emails. Its not a terribly high tech idea- but it is one that could potentially make a lot of difference in the work load of congressional staffers.   

And what about those hand crafted letters? Bennet says in Congressional offices, no one reads messages. If you use the url for the topic code, when the staffer goes to do research, it will say this many people support this issue. You can then have a place in the email form for people to add their own personal stories- then if the staffer is looking for stories, they can find them.

No one in the audience seemed too pleased to think their messages weren’t being read, but everyone agrees something needs to be done.

Mr. Bennett's presentation is available on the Internet Advocacy Roundtable website.