The Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) has released a report Communicating with Congress: Recommendations for Improving the Democratic Dialogue. In June CMF released a draft version of this report and requested that interested stakeholders review the recommendations and submit comments. The report provides some recommendations to every stakeholder, including citizens, Members of Congress, advocacy groups, and congressional offices. Members of Congress are inundated with e-mail and need more resources to effectively communicate with their constituents. According to the report, "both congressional offices and the organizers of grassroots advocacy campaigns have employed technology in ways that have unintentionally hindered the democratic dialogue. The result has been misunderstanding, frustration, wasted effort, and even anger on both sides, which must be resolved to truly realize the tremendous opportunities for electronic communications between citizens and their representatives in Congress." Advocacy groups try to get around spam filters to deliver batches of letters, while some Congressional offices update software to identify or even avoid such "form letters." Yet, each wants meaningful communication between constituents and Members. The goal of the report is to offer some solutions to the burden that all parties now face. CMF has developed the "Aggregated Communications Dashboard," which allows for improved communication by:

• Aggregating grassroots communications.
• Verifying that grassroots communications are sent from real citizens.
• Identifying the sponsoring grassroots organization and their vendor.
• Identifying the bill, amendment, or topic of the messages.
• Developing a set of open source communications standards.

CMF recommends the creation of a task force made up of stakeholders in each group with heavy authority to develop a strategy to ultimately implement a new model for constituent communications. For more on the CMF report, click here.