1.1 Summary of research findings
Emergent themes and recommendations for congressional staff, administrative offices, technology vendors, and supporting non-profits.
KEY FINDINGS
MAPPING THE PROCESS
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.
USING THE INFORMATION
3 While quality and responsiveness are higher priorities for some Members and teams than others, constituent correspondence is consistently delegated to the most junior staffers, whose turnover, experience, and capacity inhibit innovation.
4 Constituent input is used most universally to back up existing policy agendas. Some Members look to their constituents for guidance, influenced most by powerful human stories. Others find little decision-making value in the opinions of their constituents.
5 High-effort, high-reward: Staff and Members value high-touch, personal contact over low-effort apps and tools that facilitate easy engagement but provide little meaningful information about constituents.
CAPACITY FOR CHANGE
6 Offices are underwhelmed and often frustrated by the tools available to them, but they often lack time, resources, and appetite to experiment with new tools or invest in large-scale process innovation.
7 For most offices, the most significant limitations are human hours and financial resources.
8 Teams feel constrained by the rules and entities that regulate technology use, as well as their own limited experience buying and using modern tools. In addition, the lack of a competitive vendor marketplace means tools come at a high cost, and vendors aren’t pushed to provide innovative or forward-thinking solutions.
9 Innovation and experimentation — with tools, approaches, and processes — most often happen in teams lead by Members or senior staff with vision and passion for improvement, and with Party leadership teams that are willing to invest their expanded resources into paving new paths for themselves and their colleagues.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Opportunities The OpenGov Foundation has identified to directly address pain points experienced by Members and staff, breakdowns in the system, or failing approaches.
1. Invest in improving the user experience (UX) within approved constituent relationship management systems (CRMs).
2. Build a simple, accurate, and straightforward means by which all of Congress can verify constituents.
3. Update congressional CRMs to integrate social media input for better tracking and engagement on these platforms.
4. Automate and streamline core administrative tasks.
5. Test and adopt more proactive approaches to gauging constituent sentiment, using strategic and modern data analysis tools.
6. Train staff on customer service best practices.
7. Rethink the division of labor.
8. Expand the budget for staffing and technological improvements.
9. Revise administrative regulations to support technological improvements.
10. Create spaces where offices are encouraged to try new processes and technologies in an iterative manner.
1.2 Methods
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.
