Using Electronic Mail
Electronic mail is rapidly becoming a routine and accepted way for the public to communicate with their representatives in Congress.". Most (but not all) Members of Congress have adopted e-mail addresses for themselves and their staffs. Current e-mail
addresses are published in your Representative or Senator's profile at IEEE-USA's Legislative Action Center or on the U.S. House of Representatives (http://www.house.gov) and U.S. Senate (http://www.senate.gov) web servers.
By the same token, Congress has become inundated by e-mail. Congressional offices are still acquiring the software, systems and training needed to effectively manage the flow of mail, which can reach millions of messages a day when hot issues, such as presidential impeachment, become the focus of national debate. It is very important to send your email in such a way that it doesn't get lost in the crowd.
The more important tip for effective use of e-mail is to follow the same guidelines for writing an effective letter. The following are some additional Do's and Don'ts for effective use of e-mail, with explanatory notes.
BE CLEAR AND SUCCINCT. Keep your messages to the
point and don't use file attachments. Extraordinarily long e-mail missives (20 kilobytes or greater file size) and/or attachments are routinely deleted by many offices. BE SPECIFIC. Because of the nature of the e-mail medium
(e.g. the speed with which a message can be composed and dispatched, the editing limitations of the e-mail software, etc.) many e-mail writers go to the opposite extreme in terms of brevity and forget to identify the subject or issue they are concerned about. Like a good letter, your e-mail message should make clear what you want the Member to do (or not do) and give reasons why.
In his book, Congress Enters the Information Age, (Chesnut Hill, MA: Academic Press, 1996), Senate Democratic Webmaster Chris Casey uses the example of a message sent to Senator Kennedy's office, which said simply: "If you vote NO, I will remember you." The only problem was that Kennedy staffers had no clue from the message what legislation the constituent was concerned about. DO YOUR RESEARCH FIRST. Before sending your
message, do some on-line research see if your Member has already posted information about your issue on a personal or committee home page maintained on a congressional World Wide Web or Gopher server. If you find such a posting and the information still doesn't answer your question, it will at least help you to frame your message and identify issues to highlight in our e-mail. Or perhaps you may wish to search particular bill(s) to determine their status and/or see your Member's voting record. Of course, a key place to begin your research is Thomas, the U.S. Congress home page (http:/thomas.loc.gov) and/or the House/Senate web servers whose addresses are identified above. INCLUDE YOUR NAME AND POSTAL ADDRESS.
Members of Congress prefer to limit their communications exclusively to constituents due to budget and other constraints. Some offices use software filtering tools to search their daily e-mail for postal addresses (using zip codes or names of cities and/or states as keywords) to confirm which e-mails are from constituents (or at least from the Member's own state) and then automatically discard the messages that lack the requisite search terms. By including your name and a postal address, you
help identify yourself as a constituent and reduce the odds of your message ending up in an electronic trashcan. Put your name and postal address near the top of the document for those offices who manually search. ADDRESS YOUR MESSAGE TO A SINGLE RECIPIENT.
Even if you are sending the same message to several Members, it is important to individually address each e-mail. The odds that your e-mail will be read and receive a reply dips significantly if the recipient is just one name in a long list of e-mail cc's. WRITE SELECTIVELY. Apparently, some e-mail users
feel that they are enhancing their impact by writing daily and/or sending the same message over and over again to their representative in Congress. Congressional offices deal with this problem by adding so-called "bozo filters" to their computer systems to automatically sort and delete messages sent from e-mail addresses that cross a certain volume threshold. The problem of the over-communicative constituent is distinct from the next problem, which has nothing to do with
the popular processed food product. DON'T SPAM" CONGRESS. There are any number of
World Wide Web pages and e-mail lists set up to "spam" Congress (i.e. enable a sender to send a message or volume of messages at one click to all Members of Congress), sometimes over and over again. At best, these services seek to duplicate the dubious effectiveness of a post card or telex lobbying campaign through shear volume. Members and their staffs refer to these as "astroturf mailings," or artificial displays of grassroots support. At their worst, they overwhelm Congressional e-mail servers and are considered a form of electronic harassment. Suffice to say, these types of messages are accorded little weight. BE REALISTIC. You should not be disappointed to learn
that it is highly unlikely that your e-mail is actually read by your Congressional representative. Like regular mail, it will be screened and sorted by Congressional staff. Constituents who send e-mail messages to their representatives in Congress should not expect more than a brief acknowledgement by e-mail (an autoresponse message), possibly followed by a "snail mail" response. If/when you receive a reply, the response will most likely be based on a previously
approved model or position statement reflecting the Member's views on the issue on which you are writing. [ Table of Contents ]
Last Updated: April 14, 1999 |