Targeting Legislative Assistants for effectiveness

[okdistribute]

If people want to write to their member of Congress, it can be more effective if you write the "Legislative Assistant" staffer in charge of the particular area you're writing to.

For example, for Education, right now people have to search for "Rep. Barbara Lee Education LA" through Google. You can almost always find their email through google, but this is pain. Unlike contact forms that are available on almost all websites, the LA's would be great to target and would be a very generous advancement in policy advocacy.

I have received requests for this kind of tech before from activists who work in DC doing this kind of work.

[alexisgo]

This would be incredibly helpful because most tools simply target the main contact email for a particular office -- which essentially goes into a black hole and isn't read for ages.

When constitutents want to contact offices about specific issues they're having, it'd be much more effective to write to the relevant staffer on the issue. This is what lobbyists do. If we're to level the playing field, we need an easy way to find the right staffers to talk to.

@karissa There are two websites that I typically find results in when I google for particular LAs.

• http://www.congress.org
• National Journal (though their info on staffers seems to be paywalled now)

Going back to the Barbara Lee example, two good results for "Barbara Lee Education LA" are http://www.congress.org/congressorg/mlm/congressorg/bio/staff/?id=458&lvl=C&congress=1102

[sinak]

Hey Karissa. That's a really interesting idea - I love the idea of improving constituent communication with the relevant staffer, rather than pushing messages into legislator's inboxes.

From speaking to MoC staffers, the impression that I've gotten is that staffers are genuinely interested in hearing from thoughtful constituents who want to discuss legislative issues with them. But they're also very time-constrained since the staffer to constituent ratio is enormous. Each Representative on average represents 712,000 constituents, and the average Senator has over 3 million.

The way EFF handles this is to create an aggregate report for action-takers and presents the report to the relevant staffer. But for democracy.io we can't trivially do this - for the moment we aren't keeping records of what people are sending messages about, and we won't have enough volume to be able to create reports for popular issues.

Perhaps the best first step here is to talk to staffers about what might be the most helpful on their end. It might be that delivering messages straight to their email inbox would cause problems. We could perhaps create a page for each staffer where constituents can submit public messages, and then group together similar messages and deliver reports to staffer's inboxes, and give staffers an opportunity to respond publicly.

I'm not 100% sure, but it's definitely worth giving some thought as how to most delicately handle this. The worst case scenario would be one where we end up doing what Blue State Digital, Salsa, and the rest of the advocacy world have done to legislator's inboxes - i.e. clogged them full of form letters and made it more difficult for real constituent communications to happen.

[okdistribute]

@sinak why are you worried about people spamming out LAs and representatives? Not very many constituents will use this tool.

To be sure, they're already spammed out by lobbyists.

[alexisgo]

@sinak General contact forms already exist -- and they go into black holes.

Industry lobbyists pay for lists of staffer emails and phone numbers; this is part of the reason the system is imbalanced. Lobbyists constantly flood staffers. The idea here is to open up an easy way for regular constitutents, who don't have $$$ to pay for legistorm and don't know how to navigate the system, to actually be able to speak to the person who works on the issue relevant to them.

[sinak]

@karissa One of the things that we've discussed is making democracy.io tools embeddable for advocacy orgs to use. If that's the case, then it might see a lot more use. But it's by no means a definite thing yet, and it could perhaps not apply to this component.

@alexisgo You're right, getting a message to the right staffer would be really helpful.

I'm more convinced having discussed this a little. I'm imagining that we wouldn't publish the email addresses, but instead throw up forms with their own simple CAPTCHAs that allow people to email each staffer. We need to run this by EFF though - what are your thoughts @raineywritescode?