Roll Call Guest Observer Column
By Kathy Goldschmidt and Rick Shapiro
December 7, 2005
As the battle to confirm Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court heats up, millions of Americans will be encouraged by advocacy groups to communicate to their Senators support or opposition to the appointment. Many will comply.
While grass-roots campaigns generally are good for democracy, some of the practices engaged in by advocacy groups have unintended consequences that actually reduce the overall effectiveness of their campaigns and may undercut citizens’ confidence in Congress.
These assertions are based on research conducted recently by the Congressional Management Foundation. CMF monitored the Web sites and e-mail outreach efforts of two dozen advocacy groups that were actively involved in the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Harriet Miers. The idea to evaluate their practices sprang from a report CMF released this past summer, based on surveys, interviews and focus groups of more than 350 Congressional staff, that identifies effective and ineffective constituent communications practices.
CMF hopes that by providing a “post-game analysis” of advocacy campaigns during the Roberts and Miers appointment processes we can provide timely guidance to advocacy groups engaged in the Alito nomination process. If advocacy groups employ more effective and more helpful practices, they will better serve both their interests and those of Congress and our democracy. Below, we outline some of the effective and ineffective practices we observed.
Ineffective Targeting. Some groups we monitored encouraged citizens to send messages to the entire Senate Judiciary Committee or to the entire Senate. While contacting many Senators may seem more effective than contacting just the two that represent you, it is not.
Few Senate offices read or respond to messages that aren’t from constituents, even when they are related to a Senator’s committee assignment. Why? Our representative democracy is designed to ensure that Members of Congress are accountable to those who elect them, and, given limited budgets, time and staff, ignoring nonconstituent communications is the only practical way that Senators can effectively represent those who elected them. Few Senate offices review nonconstituent letters and faxes, and most employ software filters to screen nonconstituent from constituent e-mails.
During the Roberts confirmation, two groups on different ends of the ideological spectrum — the Family Research Council and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights — both encouraged participants to send messages to all 18 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Similarly, during the Miers nomination, an ad-hoc group, WithdrawMiers.org, encouraged citizens to fax all 100 Senators for a fee of $25, even though 98 percent of the messages were almost certain to be discarded.
Failing to Encourage Personalized Messages. One of the most important findings of our recent report is that personalized communications — messages written in whole or in part by the sender — are significantly more influential than identical form communications.
Of the Capitol Hill aides we surveyed, 44 percent said a personalized communication would have “a lot” of influence on a Member who was undecided on an issue, as opposed to 3 percent who said identical form communications would.
Hill staff report they are very interested in personal accounts from constituents about the impact of legislation on the district or state, the rationale for their views and stories that help connect national legislation to the lives of the people they serve. Personalized messages are even more important once you consider that 75 percent of the staff surveyed by CMF expressed doubt that identical form communications were generated with a constituent’s “knowledge or consent.”
While nearly all the groups in the Roberts and Miers nomination processes allowed citizens to personalize the text of form messages before sending them to Capitol Hill, few actively encouraged it. Failing to encourage participants to personalize their messages, and to explain how and why to do so, represents a significant missed opportunity that should be corrected to enhance the value and effectiveness of grass-roots campaigns.
Creating Unclear Expectations. If you visited the People for the American Way Web site in early August, you would have been encouraged to “sign” an online petition about then-Judge Roberts. However, the formatting of the Web page made it unclear whether the message would be sent as an individual e-mail or as a genuine petition. It also was unclear which Senators would receive the message — the constituent’s own, or others. The practices of many other groups, including Planned Parenthood, the Christian Coalition and the Judicial Confirmation Network, similarly failed to make clear what action would be taken on their behalf.
The problem with this is that citizens’ expectations for a response are likely different when they sign a petition to 100 Senators than when they send an e-mail message to two Senators. Consequently, this lack of clarity can create false expectations among participants, generate confusion and possibly discourage citizens from participating in future campaigns. They may even fuel mistrust of Congress.
By contrast, the e-mail campaign facilitated by the National Association of Manufacturers during the Roberts confirmation set clear expectations. After the participant entered a ZIP code, the screen clearly displayed the names and full contact information of the participant’s two Senators who would receive the e-mail message.
Generating Redundant Messages. There are groups in the grass-roots community that view the idea of disabling Congress by flooding offices with massive amounts of communications as tantamount to success. But while demonstrating a large base of supporters can be effective in influencing Senators, harassing them is not.
During the Roberts confirmation, the Family Research Council encouraged supporters to “contact all 18 members of the Judiciary Committee every day by phone, e-mail, and fax in both their D.C. and home offices.” According to Hill staff, practices like this typically create significant administrative burdens without influencing Senators’ thinking. Offices typically record multiple identical messages from one constituent as just one message.
Instead of bombarding offices with redundant messages, a well-timed follow-up message can be persuasive. During the Roberts campaign, for example, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State first asked supporters to e-mail their Senators to express opposition to Roberts, then later encouraged them to visit their Senators during the August recess to deliver the message in person. Persistence of this type can be extremely effective, while redundancy is usually ignored and sometimes disdained.
By modifying some of their online communications practices, groups active in the Alito nomination have the opportunity to pursue a win-win solution in which all parties — Congress, advocacy groups and the public — are better served.
Kathy Goldschmidt is the co-author of the Congressional Management Foundation report “Communicating with Congress: How Capitol Hill is Coping with the Surge in Citizen Advocacy.” Rick Shapiro is CMF’s executive director.
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