E-mail Overloads Hill Offices
Roll Call Staff
The Congressional Management Foundation, the nonpartisan, nonprofit group that provides operational advice to Congress, is in the midst of a project designed to tackle what it has long seen as a major problem facing Members and their staff: e-mail overload.
Take Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), whose e-mail system has begun crashing on a weekly basis because of all the incoming correspondence, according to staffer Rob Pierson.
“While it’s great constituents now have so many additional tools to contact the Congressman, the system was never organized and structured to fully take advantage of the technologies that are out there,” said Pierson, who also heads the House System Administrators Association.
“It’s gotten to a point where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to manage,” he added.
While most Members might not get as much e-mail as Honda — he does hail from the tech-savvy Silicon Valley, after all — staffers in both chambers have reached a breaking point when it comes to dealing with constituent communications, said Tim Hysom, director of communications and technology services for CMF.
And there’s equal frustration from constituents, advocacy groups and the vendors who help people deliver their messages to Capitol Hill, Hysom said.
“The frustration level, we think especially in Congressional offices, has reached a fever pitch,” Hysom said. “We think CMF might sort of be uniquely positioned to bring all these players to the table to bring about a solution.”
The foundation already has begun that effort. A few weeks ago, CMF brought together a small group of staffers (many of whom are involved in maintaining the institution of Congress), advocates and vendors to hash out the issues. In the fall, the foundation hopes to host similar meetings with larger groups to help identify what can be done to fix the problem, Hysom said.
The overall goal is to increase the quality of communication between Members and the constituents for whom they work. The means aren’t yet so clear.
“We don’t really have a preconceived notion of what a solution looks like,” Hysom said.
An aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said officials are working on ways to improve methods of constituent communication.
“The Internet has brought civic engagement in real time to an all time high, to the benefit of both citizens and elected officials,” the aide said. “Like any organization in the Internet age, we are looking at ways we can better facilitate this communication. We appreciate CMF’s attention to this issue and are looking forward to working in a bipartisan and bicameral way to find the best solutions.”
An Arms Race
The meetings follow up on a 2005 CMF report that found Congressional offices are spending more time than ever dealing with communication from constituents. Congress received more than 200 million individual e-mail and postal communications in 2004, according to the study, and only 7.5 percent came through the mail.
While the foundation doesn’t have specific data since the report was released, it’s a safe bet that the number of e-mails sent to Congress only has skyrocketed in the past two and a half years, Hysom said.
And over time, the amount of e-mail coming into Congress has created a communications arms race between Congressional offices and the people trying to get their message to Members.
Here’s how it happened:
The original e-mail addresses assigned to Members were public, allowing anybody to send messages. But after too much e-mail came in that way, most offices switched to Web forms, requiring the public to send messages directly from Member Web sites.
But eventually even that got too messy, so many offices put logic puzzles on their Web sites, forcing e-mailers to decode a simple puzzle before sending their message.
“And now there are advocacy groups who found their way around the logic puzzle,” Hysom said. “So, some Congressional offices are blocking [Internet protocol] addresses.”
The addition of the logic puzzles was especially controversial when they first appeared last year.
It led to the creation of a coalition called “Don’t Block My Voice,” which then sent e-mails urging Members who had begun using the logic puzzles to take them down.
Among those who helped with the effort was Grace Markarian, the online communications manager for The Humane Society of the United States. While Markarian admitted the puzzles themselves aren’t difficult to decipher, she said it is the psychological barrier the puzzles present that is troubling.
“It just feels a little funny,” she said. “It’s just an additional barrier to people. And why should there be barriers?”
Markarian said many groups and constituents who have legitimate issues to bring to Members are frustrated because it is becoming exceedingly difficult to address such matters with their Representatives.
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