It happens sometimes to every office -- a backlog of old mail that seems insurmountable. Here are some recommendations from the CMF mail specialists that might help you get your office back on track.

1. You cannot do business as usual. Simply integrating the backlog into your current system will not work, you need to prioritize.

2. Create a new mail plan that prioritizes the importance of each category of mail. Constituents care most about a quick reply in judging the responsiveness of a letter. To “triage” mail and turn it around quickly you need to develop a temporary prioritization system to determine which mail gets answered first.

• Separate the mail, focusing on issues that are the most timely and significant to your district/state from the rest of the mail. Only issues that have the largest impact on your constituents should be tagged for immediate reply. Keep your priority issue list selective, no more than five to six issues, including national security and economic stimulus issues.

3. Consider creating a one-time generic response. To ensure that the greatest number of constituents receive replies quickly, prepare a one-size-fits-all response.

• Decide which constituents will get the one-size-fits-all letter (possibly the majority of all constituent mail), which ones will get form letters, and which ones will get new, original text letters (very few).
• The one-size-fits-all response should: thank the constituent for sharing his views and acknowledge that the Member has read the letter and understands his or her point of view; apologize for not sending an individual response; include a few paragraphs on the work the Member is doing to address matters important to your district.

4. Adjust your resources. In addition to adjusting your content, you must also consider adjusting your resources. For some offices, that might mean hiring part-time staff or a vendor to assist. For others, this might not be possible under current budget levels. What all offices can do, however, is review and discuss staff roles, and possibly make temporary assignments. Think of ways that all staff can help with the backlog: what can interns assist with? How can the district/state staff help? Can the LAs and LCs shift some writing assignments for more equitable distribution of work? Remember as we said at the outset, a backlog is an office-wide issue that you must address strategically as a team.

5. Streamline your process. As part of your review of staff assignments, take a moment to quickly review your mail process itself and determine if there are superfluous steps that are contributing to the backlog. For example, front desk staff (whether in DC or the district/state) not logging calls directly into your database while on the phone, or undefined editing roles causing too many staff reviews of drafted text. Duplicative efforts and any steps your office takes that do not directly contribute to timeliness or quality control should be eliminated from your mail process. To address the backlog, you may need to reduce the number of staff who review each letter.

6. Answer via email. This is a long-term solution to your mail problem and one that all congressional offices eventually will adopt. Instead of printing out a reply, double checking the accuracy of the address, folding it and stuffing it in an envelope, you will accomplish the same thing electronically, and respond to your constituents quicker. And by all means, don’t just answer email with email, answer ALL mail with email if you have an email address on file. Full utilization of email will save your office time and money.

7. Shorten the responses. Even though we live in an email world, most congressional offices are responding to email with a letter-length response (or longer). There are a few problems with this. First, longer responses take longer to draft, which increases the time it takes for you to respond (which leads to a cranky constituent). Second, you’re not writing to the format of the medium. Emails are meant to be short, two to three paragraphs in length. (Think about the last time you read a four-paragraph email … which you probably didn’t.) Finally, the greatest investment of offices resources isn’t the drafting of the response, it’s the editing and revision. Think of the process like an assembly line. The most expensive employee on the assembly line is the Chief of Staff or Legislative Director who reviews the drafts. The shorter the responses, the less time they spend reviewing them.