Section 1: Project overview
Mapping the processes, technology, and human experiences behind the scenes of Congress’ constituent engagement operations.
“Thanks for calling the office of Congressperson _______. Sorry, we can’t get to the phone right now.“
After the Presidential election of 2016, our country experienced a rising tide of citizen engagement. New apps and tools were invented seemingly overnight to reduce friction in contacting Members of Congress, and advocacy organizations new and old activated hundreds of thousands of Americans to speak up. Quite suddenly, Congress faced reportedly the largest uptick in constituent input in recent memory.
Amidst this flurry of civic engagement, stories emerged of overflowing voicemail boxes, woefully understaffed congressional offices, and bitter, disgruntled constituents.
Meanwhile, on the other side of D.C., organizations such as 18F and the U.S. Digital Service have been busy sharing lessons from the private-sector technology industry with federal agencies, successfully helping redesign and rebuild core public services. Thanks to these efforts, veterans have been able to access their VA healthcare more seamlessly, processing time of green card renewals has dropped, and hundreds of digital services have migrated to secure, modern cloud-hosted platforms.
At The OpenGov Foundation, our mission is to serve the teams inside Congress who serve the American people. We are technologists with a love of efficiency and innovation, and our purpose is to reimagine and improve the hard and thorny sides of governance. As we witnessed the challenges facing congressional teams in this new era of civic engagement, we knew this was a key moment to call upon lessons of other user-centered, 21st century digital transformation efforts.
Understanding our users
Taking a page — the very first page — out of the U.S. Digital Service Playbook, we sought to start at the beginning: to deeply understand, from the experience of the people inside Congress, the authentic, day-to-day challenges, pain points, needs, and limitations facing those on the other side of the phone. What happens after we the people leave a message, send an email, or post to social media? What technology do staff use to keep track of it all? What do they do with all those messages anyway? Are there openings for new approaches or solutions? Who is leading creative and interesting ways of engaging with constituents?
During the late summer of 2017, The OpenGov Foundation undertook a first-of-its-kind effort to apply a human-centered design/user research approach to investigate the systems, tools, constraints, and human drivers that fuel congressional constituent correspondence processes.
This report holds the findings of our work.
Our driving questions
In order to frame and guide our research of congressional teams, we developed three themes, around which this report is organized:
1. How do congressional teams manage the process and operations of constituent engagement?
2. How does constituent input shape actions and decisions?
3. What capacity do congressional teams have for change?
We invite you to join us in exploring insights and visualizations from this work, read stories from the people answering your calls and letters, and begin to imagine concrete opportunities for building a responsive, people-centered 21st century Congress.
1.1 Summary of research findings
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.
