Electronic advocacy today carries some great benefits. In particular, we can now witness the breaking down of geographic boundaries as a factor in delivering messages to elected officials and policymakers. This in turn reduces the time and cost involved in sending correspondence. Newer tools now make it possible to efficiently generate a high volume of personalized, customizable, and targeted communications with relative ease.

Despite the technology advances in place to benefit the senders of electronic correspondence, many congressional offices are not yet equipped to address the receipt and management of electronic correspondence in a manner befitting other forms of communication, specifically hard copy letters and faxes.

The NPT Project has had a number discussions with Congressional staffers, Hill systems administrators (including representatives from the House Clerk's office and Senate Majority Leader's office), information systems vendors, advocacy organizations, and researchers and academics regarding e-mail on Capitol Hill, the best ways to effectively channel messages to Congress over the Internet, and the future of Congressional electronic communications.

Hill staffers and system administrators, in sharing their views on how incoming electronic mail is handled, continually make clear that their primary concern is addressing and responding to electronic mail from constituents, and effectively weeding out mail from non-constituents and routing that to the appropriate Member. An additional problem is meeting the expectations of people who send electronic mail. They expect their e-mail to be answered online, and immediately. It's even worse if you do manage to respond immediately to an e-mail, as that only raises the expectation for all subsequent mail to be answered as quickly. Staffers have said that if you are not a constituent, and if you do not provide contact information, including an address and phone number, then your e-mail won't be answered.

Interestingly, staffers also emphasized that if messages are e-mailed en masse to congressional offices, they are most likely to be heard by no one. They stated that, just as in regular letter writing, if you are writing to a committee member or other elected official that does not represent your state or district, it is important to emphasize why you are writing her/him. The administrators also shared information on new systems they are trying out to improve the internal capacity to respond more efficiently to e-mail, so that it is treated with the same priority as hard copy letters.

Hill offices are considering the elimination of all public e-mail addresses in favor of "e-mail forwarding" services like the House's "Write Your Representative" service. Write Your Representative," however, cannot be directly accessed through outside e-mail gateways. They require users to go to a website, and to enter their contact information to be through a form, in order to reduce the possibility of spam. Advocacy groups have expressed concern that all Hill offices might move to adopt both courses of action. The main worry is that people lose direct electronic access to member offices.

Member offices counter that providing public addresses opens them up to a flood of non-constituent mail, and does not ensure quality control as much as a system that forces contact information to be appended to messages.

Another gateway interface is provided courtesy of America Online's My Government, developed in partnership with Capitol Advantage. This interface was set up after negotiations with House and Senate leadership and systems administrators, and allows AOL users to send messages to their members of Congress. Some advocacy groups, however, wonder if it was good to have a company develop what seems like a proprietary arrangement to set up a gateway to Congress that few, if any groups, could also set up. A relatively small number of groups, moreover, have raised the concern that such a service might not be accessible to all people, especially those on a slower connect, older browser, or who are visually-impaired.

Advocacy groups in general also stress that they would like to ensure more quality control among their advocates, supporters, and allies who mount e-mail campaigns, including making sure that people who sign electronic petitions provide adequate contact information.

Some groups, like NetAction, have gone as far as to develop “do's and don'ts” regarding e-mail as both an organizing tool for constituencies and a communications tool with elected officials. Additionally, this would include a clearer scheme for announcing the purpose or subject of electronic correspondence that could both grab attention and raise awareness. Putnam Barber, Editor of The Internet Nonprofit Center and President of The Evergreen State Society, described options for how this might be done in a 1994 essay.

They raised the concern, however, that many folks are reluctant to include this information to Hill and executive branch targets out of privacy concerns. While the Hill offices stressed the need for such information as a useful means for verification and follow-up purposes, there was also a worry that such information might be used to compile a prospect list for fundraising purposes, or for franking lists.

There have been rumblings on the Hill regarding the test deployment of a system called EchoMail, which has the capability to create profiles of an electronic mail's sender. Such a profiling tool could be useful for creating more effective constituent services, including better-targeted response, but it could also be used to screen out and filter dissenting voices and other groups not on an office's priority list of contacts (if such a list exists). Such systems also raise the same privacy concerns noted earlier. There were also discussions of better deployment of fax servers that would allow e-mail to be converted to fax hard copy documents.

In general, advocacy groups and the Hill agree that technology, if it is to be deployed successfully to ensure better communications with members, needs to take into account the type of communications people want. A distinction was drawn among a personal "one-on-one" approach; a full-blown campaign around an issue; campaigns that raise the profile or visibility of an issue; and campaigns that seek sponsorship or a particular vote on an issue.

The advocacy groups, moreover, did agree that electronic communications should not be used as a crutch, but should be treated as a complementary communication method in addition to phone calls, traditional letters, office visits, and media strategies.

U.S. House fo Representatives
Write Your Representative service

Capitol Advantage

Email Outreach "Do's and Don'ts"
NetAction's Virtual Activist Training Guide)

Putnam Barber 1994 Essay

"Senate Adopts Advanced Mail Management"
(7/5/99) Federal Computer Week, Margaret Johnston

Other Resources Listing of Free Congressional Directories
Library of Congress