Section 2: Process
Mapping the process for receiving, understanding, and responding to constituent input.
OVERVIEW
In this section, we will illustrate the process of constituent engagement. This includes the basic flow of tasks, staff members and their roles, and a detailed visualization of how House and Senate teams receive, organize, seek to understand, and respond to all manner of constituent input.
We will then highlight where the constituent engagement process breaks down, what the users of this system — the staff — need to be able to complete their tasks, and the technological underpinnings of the operation.
KEY FINDINGS
1 The average system by which a Member of Congress’ team receives input, organizes, and responds to constituents is heavily manual and time-consuming, supported by limited technology that is slow to evolve.
2 The current process was designed around postal correspondence and has yet to adapt to new tools people use to engage with their Members of Congress — and vice versa — on the Internet and via social media.
COMMON BREAKDOWNS
- Verifying whether someone is a constituent is an imperfect, and at times blocking, step.
- Social media engagement is handled inconsistently and doesn’t yet translate to the same formal tracking as other channels.
- High call volumes strain limited human and technological capacities to — and beyond — the breaking point.
- Organizing correspondence — also known as “batching” — within constituent relationship management systems (CRM) is manual, uniformly imprecise, time consuming, and commonly loathed.
- Teams often lose track of unresolved constituent communications due to confusing technology design.
- Correspondence tools clumsily handle the most time-consuming steps of the process: review, revision, and approval of new outgoing messages to constituents.
- Frontline phone intake is handled exclusively by junior staff and unpaid interns whose ability to accurately understand, log, and organize messages shapes how the office will or will not respond.
2.1 People and workflow
This article is part of From Voicemails to Votes (PDF), a report conducted by The OpenGov Foundation on the mindsets, capacities, tools, and operations of Congressional offices with regard to constituent engagement. More about the project here.
