Net Effect I logged on late to the live-streamed event, Internet Advocacy Roundtable: The Future of Emailing Congress - New Solutions Offered and Old Myths Busted, hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

I caught up on 40Brown's Live Blog where Daniel Bennett, co-author of the Net Effect and consultant for elected representatives and non-profit organizations, started off by quoting,

Software and laws are like sausages- they're good, but you shouldn't see them being made!

(Personally, I like to know what my sausage is made of.)

Daniel cleared up some misunderstandings and myths in Internet Communications between Congress and constituents.

When email to Congress began, there was a myth that it was more work than paper mail and signatures. And maybe, in the beginning it was -- emails were printed to deal with them in the traditional ways. But as email became more popular and after the Anthrax scare, many offices began to receive correspondence only in electronic form.

Along with this, advocacy groups increased their use of email, so the volume became too much for staffers to handle. Offices started turning off regular emails, stating that it was a problem with spam, when really it was easy to determine if an email was about Viagra or voting on a certain issue.

Another myth developed about the need for personalized individual emails but vendors figured out how to fake those, too. With the creation of web forms, the onslaught was slowed, but this really wasn't a solution.

Members of Congress (in theory) thrive on communication from their constituents, but there was this huge amount of work, so a battle between advocacy groups and staffers began.

Because of the inadequate system for dealing with constituent messages forwarded to Congressional offices by advocacy groups, Daniel set out to set up a standard way for members of Congress to have there own web forms and for advocacy groups to be able to communicate through them.

Daniel's criteria for a new system:

• had to be free
  
• work seamlessly
  
• easy to use and free for advocacy groups
  
• additional messages cannot increase the overall amount of work for staffers
• finally, make sure to beat back some of these myths!

Implementation of such a system is really quite simple for Congressional offices, taking from just a few minutes to a few weeks depending on the vendor. All that needs to happen is the creation of a new email address that can accept formatted emails. Advocacy Groups then just need to add a topic code (URL) to their messages. Check out further explanation in the paper, Communicating with Congress by way of Advocacy Groups: Using the Topic Code on Advocate Hope website.

With this system, members of Congress can easily bundle messages, craft a response, and tabulate responses, without reading every message.

Does it make you feel like your individual message is unimportant? I think so, but what are the chances your personally crafted message will ever be read? Not high.

So the technology exists to create a more efficient way for staffers to collect and process what constituents are saying. This unique URL can link back to the page where people originally were asked to contribute. An interesting point brought up in the Q/A is how this could be used to compile individual stories for times when a member of Congress would need that personalized story or voice to bring to the floor.

While this technology has existed for the past 4 years, there still has not been a big uptake. This was part of Daniel's objective in participating in the Roundtable.

The other big takeaway was that there is no political formula for this -- it's up to us as citizens and advocacy groups to create a good reputation and relationship with our Congress members if we want our voices heard.

I'm curious to know what the advocacy groups out there think of the proposed solution. Will they help to implement it? Please respond in the comments!