Resistbot doesn’t ask for a full address until the second day (on the first day, the fax does include your name, city, zip code, and phone number) because, the app creators say, they wanted to eliminate that extra step to maximize engagement. And so that really doesn’t facilitate a good democratic dialogue in a society–that actually has the opposite effect of creating more distrust about democratic institutions.” “If individuals personalize their communications, and talk about the impact of a particular bill or an issue on them locally, that is going to have much more impact on congressional offices.” “Who am I going to blame if I don’t get a message back? You’re going to blame the member of Congress you’re going to think you’re ignored. “Think about the user experience if I’m a constituent and I use the service and I send a message to Capitol Hill,” Fitch says. But the Congressional Management Foundation surveyed congressional offices and found that in-person visits have the most impact individualized emails and letters had slightly more impact than phone calls.įitch also cautions that if a service doesn’t ask for someone’s full address and include it, it could cause more fundamental problems: Many offices may automatically screen the message out, which could further weaken the relationship between constituents and representatives. Phone calls, she said, were more effective than letters or emails.
In the Senate, it’s even in the hundreds of thousands.” “We’re seeing in some offices where they might get, on a busy month, 6,000 or 7,000 messages–we’re now seeing some offices get more than 8,000 a week.”Īfter the election, Emily Ellsworth, a former congressional staffer, tweeted a series of suggestions about the best way to contact a member of Congress. “We’re seeing in some offices where they might get, on a busy month, 6,000 or 7,000 messages–we’re now seeing some offices get more than 8,000 a week,” says Brad Fitch, president and CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation, which works with Congress and constituents to make their interactions more effective. The nonprofit Congressional Management Foundation, which is currently working to quantify the massive increase in calls and emails to representatives over the last two months, says that, anecdotally, some offices are seeing a quadrupling in the number of messages, or more. It’s also a way around overloaded phone lines.
0 kommentar(er)
