08/25/2011
By Donny Shaw
As congressional approval reaches new lows, it’s more important than ever that people have a reliable public forum for communicating with their members of Congress. Yet, as we’ve seen during this August recess, communicating with Congress is actually getting more difficult. Less than half of senators and representatives are holding public town hall meetings this year. Constituents trying to speak with their members are being threatened with arrest, and those fortunate enough to be able to attend meetings are having their rights to document the public events violated by police.
Clearly we need better channels for open discourse between the public and their elected officials. That’s what motivated us to build our free and open-source suite of OpenCongress v.3 tools, which put engaging with Congress at the center of the site experience.
Until now, to email members of Congress people had to visit separate websites for their three lawmakers, fill out three different web forms, and submit messages via an opaque system that, frankly, feels like it feeds to a paper shredder at the other end. With our Contact-Congress tool, now you can email all three of your lawmakers at the same time, get a custom permalink to your letter, share it with your social networks, and track responses on a public forum. Plus, our unique message-builder platform makes it easy to add campaign finance information relevant to your topic, important bits of legislative text, comments from peers, and more in one click. Full details of how that works here.
Since we launched OpenCongress v.3 about one month ago, we’ve delivered more than 1,500 original messages to Congress about specific pieces of pending legislation. That may not sound like a lot compared to the numbers organization get with their petitions and form letters, but these are all individually-crafted, personalized and detail-rich messages, which research shows have a much stronger impact on members of Congress. According to a study from the Congressional Management Foundation, “Only 3% of staff surveyed say identical form postal mail would have ‘a lot’ of influence on their Member of Congress if he/she had not reached a decision. In contrast, 44% report individualized postal letters would have ‘a lot’ of influence.” And, in case you’re wondering, email and postal mail are equally influential to an undecided Member.
