2.3 Technology
A number of products and platforms underpin the constituent engagement process; the most commonly discussed with our team were CRMs, collaboration software, and social media tools.
CRMs
The core piece of software used by congressional teams to manage constituent contact is a constituent relationship management system (CRM), which is generally designed around the mail intake and response workflow.
A CRM is a common off-the-shelf tool used across industries to categorize a database of people. Congressional teams have formal authority to use a handful of third-party CRMs, which have been designed specifically for the congressional mail process — sometimes also referred to as contact management systems (CMS) or constituent service systems (CSS). Email and mail arrive automatically in these systems (email via each Member’s website email form and mail via the congressional letter scanning center). All other input must be entered manually, or custom functionality must be built by the vendors.
The constituent correspondence process is supported by a small set of formally approved CRMs, which most of our research participants would describe as fair to terrible.
There are fewer than 10 authorized CRMs primarily used by offices. Two of these are far more commonly used than the rest due to quality and level of support. While both regularly update their platforms and take feature requests, there are common challenges — and a few standout positive features — across the board:
CRM PAIN POINTS
Authorized CRMs run on servers hosted on-site in D.C., making for painfully slow load times for district offices — especially those on the other side of the country.
“I once watched one of our caseworkers open the software, then leave her desk, go get a cup of coffee, come back, and wait a few more minutes for a folder to open.”
Attempts to automate the highly manual process of batching similar incoming messages for next steps do not work well enough to save staff the manual efforts.
“There’s some language detection stuff but it’s about six to eight years behind, so there’s no confidence among our staff in the quality of that, and you end up kind of manually going through and checking this.”
Staff sometimes end up spending hours on painstaking manual interactions that can, in fact, be handled within the CRM, but are obscured by poor design.
“There is a distinct step where we have to manually attach a form letter to each record in the batch.” [There is an ‘apply to all’ feature the staffer didn’t know about.]
Losing track of records and correspondence is cited as a regular problem.
“I have trouble finding things that I know are in the database.”
“It’s bad, but we often lose records within the system.”
The drafting and review of new responses is time-consuming, involves multiple team members, and is not supported in a usable way within the CRM.
“It lacks any kind of revision/approval tools and forces us to do manual handoff of documents via endless email threads and tracked changes in Word docs.”
HELPFUL CRM FEATURES
Real-time dashboards and analytics allow staff to easily manage their constituency and workload simultaneously.
“The ability to see who on your team has the most pending mail — and thus who is contributing to a backlog — is helpful (if sometimes a bit misleading as some letters just take more work to respond to).”
“It allows us to gauge voter/constituent demographics within a campaign/issue/batch.”
Detection and auto-grouping of campaign/petition emails, as well as identification of source of campaign, are imperfect but helpful.
“I really like the way they group campaign email so I don’t have to manually find and respond to the same thing 500 separate times.”
COLLABORATION SOFTWARE
Many offices complement their CRMs with semi-approved and/or entirely unapproved collaboration tools, which allow them to work together in real time, in a swifter and more responsive manner.
“We use Google Drive, which isn’t [approved] since it’s not in the network.”
“Slack is a common means for effective communication between DO and D.C.”
“Internally we only use Slack and don’t do any email — it’s increased our efficiency tremendously.”
“We supplement our process with Google Drive since we can’t use [our CRM] off site.”
“Google Docs and Excel Sheets are often used to track response process for both DO and D.C.”
“Eventbrite is occasionally used by DO for marketing and events.”
“We probably use a dozen off-the-shelf technologies, which help us do all of the tasks we need to accomplish on any given day.”
SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS
Social media is and will continue to be a critical tool in any congressional office. It affords offices a real-time and authentic view into their constituency, and offers constituents insight into the workings, opinions, and personality of their Members of Congress.
“I get a lot of insight into constituents from social media via their comments and their feedback — and now Facebook has a new feature where we can see what people are talking about and sharing within a geographical area, which is helpful.”
“We use social to show the human side of our boss — so people don’t just see a suit in D.C., but what his day-to-day life is like, to humanize him.”
“This year we saw a huge increase in civic engagement from people who were not previously engaged — both in email and online in social media.”
“It really feels like Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly more active among our constituents.”
“Social media allows us to reach out to and bring more people into government, which we think is a good thing.”
Offices aren’t yet approaching the operational aspects of social media consistently, as many are still experimenting with what works best for their needs.
Tracking social media comments into formal reporting mechanisms — such as a CRM — is done differently from office to office, if at all.
“We don’t track any of the contact that we have with people online.”
“Social interactions are tracked manually (but not in our CRM) and included in weekly press reports.”
“Comments from social media are tracked, but I’m not sure who ultimately ends up seeing this or if/how that info is used.”
Members of Congress’ involvement with social media authorship and engagement varies widely across offices.
“Our boss looks at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., all the time. He sends staff screenshots of things to respond to and uses it to get a sense of what people in his district are talking about.”
“The Press Secretary has full discretion to post on our official Twitter and Facebook accounts. The Member has his own accounts, which he posts to personally.”
Furthermore, congressional CRMs don’t yet support social media — and it’s not clear how to do this, even if they did.
“Social media is a burden to track because it doesn’t fit cleanly into the CRM — nothing is pulled in automatically..”
“Our CRM doesn’t really let us do anything with regard to social media tracking. We have to do it all manually if we want it.”
“I’d like to have one integrated platform that can handle inputs from different channels, such as comments from Facebook and Twitter.”
“Incoming social media engagement doesn’t get logged in our CRM because… how would I even log that?”
It’s unclear how staff would use current methods to process social engagement, as it is more nuanced and complex than traditional inputs.
“We don’t really know how to systematically handle social media engagement. Is a comment the same as message? Is it the same as a ‘like’ or retweet?”
“How would I log a tweet or a post? Is it in support or opposed? What if it’s posted with no comment? Or what if it has snark like a post with only the caption ‘Sad!’? How do I know what that means or how to respond?”
2.4 Opportunities to improve engagement operations
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.
