summary of implications for citizens and grassroots organizations
- quality is more persuasive than quantity.
- the organization behind a grassroots campaign matters.
- grassroots organizations should develop a better understanding of Congress.
- there is a difference between being noticed and having an impact.
1. quality is more persuasive than quantity.
Thoughtful, personalized constituent messages generally have more influence than a large number of identical form messages. The operating assumption of many congressional staff is that the more time and effort constituents take to communicate, the more passionately they care about the issue. This is not to say that there is no value to grassroots campaigns or that large quantities of identical form messages are never persuasive. This is simply to say that quality messages almost always trump quantity on Capitol Hill. Quality messages are those that are:
- Short. House Legislative Assistants and Senate Legislative Correspondents review hundreds of letters every week, so covering an issue in a few short paragraphs helps them immensely.
- Targeted. Messages that convey knowledge of specific legislation, the Member's stance on the issue, and the impact the legislation will have on the Member's constituents, district, or state tend to be much more persuasive than generic messages.
- Informative. Congressional offices do not have the resources to research and track every bill, so they focus on legislation being considered in their Members' committees or by the full House or Senate. Often constituents bring new legislation to their attention, requiring staff to do research so as to be able to discuss and respond to it. For this reason, quality messages contain specific information about the legislation in question.
2. the organization behind a grassroots campaign matters.
Congress depends on grassroots organizations to provide important policy information on issues and legislation, and citizens depend on them to provide guidance on when, how, and why to become activists. Increasingly, however, congressional staff do not trust grassroots organizations and the mass form communications they generate. Some grassroots campaigns are not up front about the organization behind the campaign, and as a result, valuable staff time is spent independently trying to identify the source of the campaign. Grassroots organizations that identify themselves in the messages they send saves staffers time and allows them to devote their time to researching the issue and generating a response.
3. grassroots organizations should develop a better understanding of Congress.
Congressional staff become frustrated when the organizations running grassroots campaigns clearly do not understand how Congress works. In many cases, staff indicated that the quality and impact of constituent communications would increase if organizations generating campaigns better understood Congress and the legislative process. It would help for grassroots organizations to factor the following concepts into their campaigns.
- Communications should only come from constituents. There are still citizens who send messages to Members who do not represent them, and there are still grassroots organizations that encourage and facilitate this practice. However sincere the reasons, Congress is a representative body whose Members are beholden to their own constituents. As a courtesy, some Members forward messages to the appropriate Members, but few read or respond to messages not from their own constituents.
- Timing in the legislative cycle matters. The actions a Member can take are different at different points in the legislative process, so it is important for a grassroots organization to know the status of a bill, understand the possible actions a Member can take at each stage, coordinate its campaign around an appropriate action, and craft its message accordingly.
- The chamber in which a bill was introduced matters. House Members cannot vote on Senate bills or court nominations, and Senators cannot vote on House bills, so campaigns urging a Member of one chamber to take action on legislation from the other chamber cannot yield results. When grassroots campaigns fail to identify the companion legislation to a bill introduced in the other chamber, staff must either ignore the messages or spend significant time researching it.
- Members may already have positions on the legislation. Congressional offices are often subject to grassroots campaigns requesting or admonishing the Member to support legislation he or she already supports. Grassroots organizations can save resources and target only Members that need persuading by using the Internet to determine a Member's stance on a bill or issue, or by studying the sponsors and co-sponsors of the legislation and the roll call votes of similar legislation.
- Members' office resources are limited. Members of Congress and their staffs have significant and diverse demands on their time. In addition to responding to constituent communications, they also advocate for legislation, secure funds and support for local programs, and coordinate national strategy with local interests. Grassroots organizations that understand this, and coordinate their communications efforts accordingly, are generally looked upon more favorably than those which do not.
- Offices have processes and systems to manage constituent communications. A problem in any part of the process for handling congressional mail can bring the whole system to a grinding halt. Grassroots organizations need to understand and work with an office's processes and systems, instead of trying to work around them. This includes sending communications to the Washington office, rather than the district or state office; properly formatting e-mail messages that are not sent via the Members' Web forms; and providing constituents' names, addresses, and zip codes in each message.
- Form e-mail messages are easier to manage than faxes. For a variety of reasons, including that e-mail can be automatically filtered and that paper creates a nice pile in a congressional office, many grassroots organizations have opted to send form messages via fax rather than via e-mail. However, most congressional offices prefer to receive form e-mail over form faxes. When formatted correctly, form e-mail is easy for congressional offices to process, count, and respond to. Form faxes require a lot of data entry and administrative work, in addition to requiring a lot of toner and paper, which can get expensive.
4. there is a difference between being noticed and having an impact.
Bad grassroots practices may get noticed on Capitol Hill, but they tend not to be effective at influencing the opinions of Members of Congress, and they sometimes damage the relationship between congressional offices and grassroots organizations. Almost every congressional staffer to whom we spoke told stories of grassroots campaigns that had frustrated, overwhelmed, or even attacked their offices through targeted operations. These campaigns usually get an office's attention, but they are far more likely to anger the Member and staff than to persuade them to support the cause being advocated. Although bad practices may not be the norm, they have caused offices to develop a skepticism that makes it more difficult for any grassroots campaign to be trusted or viewed as credible. Some of the worst practices that offices reported are:
- Misrepresenting the Member's position. Many grassroots campaigns generate the same message to all Members, which, as previously stated, results in Members being asked to take positions they have already publicly taken. For example, Members are sometimes subject to grassroots campaigns encouraging them to support legislation of which they are sponsors or co-sponsors. Other times, Members are scolded for supporting a position that they clearly state on their Web sites they do not support. This forces Members and staff to correct positions that have been misrepresented to constituents by grassroots organizations, an exercise viewed as a waste of everyone's time and energy - the office's, the constituent's, and the grassroots organization's.
- Attempting to overwhelm an office. Some grassroots organizations see it as a challenge or a point of pride to attract a Member's attention by effectively shutting down his or her office. Usually, this is done by sending such high volumes of e-mail, phone calls, faxes or letters that the entire staff has to be temporarily re-assigned to manage the communications. This rare practice does attract the attention of Members and staff, but it sometimes causes Member and staff to mistrust the organization that generates the campaign. This hinders the organization's ability to be effective in future efforts to persuade the Member.
- Generating multiple identical messages from one constituent. Congressional offices often receive identical messages from a single constituent. These messages are sometimes generated through multiple actions by the constituent. Other times, the multiple messages are generated through a single constituent action, which a grassroots organization takes as permission to send multiple messages on the constituent's behalf. In most offices, these messages count as a single communication, but they create extra work for staff, who must sort through them and identify messages from the same constituent. One message per constituent per campaign will usually suffice, unless new or substantively different information needs to be conveyed.
- Facilitating phone calls without adequately preparing constituents. Congressional offices are occasionally subject to poor phone campaigns. Generally, grassroots organizations coordinate a phone bank through which telephone operators call potential activists to ask if they would like to express their views to their Member of Congress. When they say yes, they are either transferred to a congressional office or the call is terminated and a second call is initiated, which rings both the constituent's phone and the Member's office phone at the same time. Often, however, this results in confused constituents either trying to stammer through a message or wondering why the staffer who answered the phone in the Member's office called them. In either case, this places congressional staff in a position of counseling constituents while trying to figure out what the campaign is about. When the campaign initiates just a few of these calls, this practice is simply inconvenient. When the campaign is responsible for many of these calls, it can prevent an entire office from doing anything else until the calls stop.
- Targeting a specific staffer. Occasionally, grassroots organizations will direct a mass message campaign to a specific staffer by including the staffer's name, direct dial phone number, and/or e-mail address in their messages to their activists. When the effort results in a few messages from activists with whom the staffer already has a relationship, this is not necessarily a problem. However, when the effort results in a flood of e-mail or phone calls, the staffer is debilitated until the campaign is over and his or her e-mail inbox and voicemail box are cleaned out. Although the offices of only a few of the staff whom we interviewed had been subjected to this practice, they remembered it vividly, and it usually damaged the relationship between the entire office and the organization that generated the campaign.
Although these five worst practices are not regularly practiced, each can consume substantial Member office resources. As such, they are contributing to the view that identical form communications should have little, if any, influence on Members. CMF intends to learn more about the actual practices of grassroots organizations. At present, however, our one-sided research indicates that, even if these practices are not prevalent, they are common enough in the experience of many congressional staff to cause them to be increasingly skeptical of all grassroots communications.
The burden is now on the facilitators of grassroots campaigns to avoid these practices and to discourage others from using them, so that a more thoughtful and meaningful dialogue with elected officials can be constructed for the future.
CwC: How Capitol Hill is Coping with the Surge in Citizen Advocacy
Read the full report:  CWC_CapitolHillCoping (754 KB)
46 pages
Copyright 2005 by the Congressional Management Foundation
About the Communicating with Congress Project
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Project Overview - In 2001, CMF began work on this project to improve communications between citizens and Members of Congress.
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