Contributing Editor Eve Fox just passed on some alerting news we should all be concerned with:

For some time, most members of Congress have refused to accept email messages directly, requiring their constituents to fill out ‘web forms’, instead, in an attempt to both cut down on the volume of online communications they receive and to code them by issue area to make sorting and tallying the comments easier for staffers.  Up to now, advocacy groups have gotten around this by using software with the ability to bypass these web forms, collecting the user info they need to automatically fill in the required fields, keeping the user’s experience quick and painless.

But recently, activists have begun receiving messages from several Senators’ offices (at least five that we know of) informing them that their comments will be ignored because they came through a third party web site.  It’s not that they can’t receive the messages, it’s just that they refuse to acknowledge them once they’ve received them, citing unprompted letters and unsolicited spam as their rationale. 

This situation raises some interesting questions:

- How can we work with Congress to improve communication? 

- Is email a dead medium for this purpose?

- Does this new development mean faxing will become the new email?  And if so, how long before faxes become totally obsolete?

- Is the “hit Reply to take action” option offered by most advocacy software packages really a curse in disguise? This feature, originally designed to make taking action online even easier is likely the cause of many of the “unprompted letters” from constituents who hit reply, accidentally taking action without meaning to or being aware that they have done so.

- How can we improve the quality of mass communications to Congress?  Does the advocacy community as a whole need to come up with standards for these communications?  Ideas include: always using constituent matching so that only a member’s constituents are contacting him or her, targeting your messages to include only decision-makers who have a stake in the issue you’re working on (no more ccing all of Congress!), making editing a message and subject line a requirement instead of an option, collecting names and comments via email and delivering them via a printed petition, etc.

- Does the advocacy community also need to stop relying so heavily on email?  Phone calls, faxes, in person visits, printed letters, etc., usually carry more weight though they tend to lack the same volume of participation.

- Do software vendors need to change the way they deliver these messages to allow for easier tabulation and sorting on the Hill end of things? 

- Should email campaigns be considered more of a simple “voting “ model, rather than asking people to write long letters?

- Is there a need for a massive education effort aimed at the Hill?  Members are chronically understaffed and dealing with millions of emails (many of them form letters) is surely a thankless and time-consuming task, yet it is quite literally their job to accept comments from their constituents so to say point blank that they’re ignoring your letter seems a little brazen and out of touch with reality. 

Resources
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Congressional Management Foundation
Open Government Data Exchange 

Eve is Senior Consultant & Deputy Directory of eCampaigns at M&R Strategy Services.